


For All the Stars in the Sky

by allyoop_1, Wolfy_P_Smith



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Abandonment, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, But mostly fluff, Dad Keith, Dad Shiro, Family Feels, Family Issues, Fluff, Grief/Mourning, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, Kid Pidge | Katie Holt, Light Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Waiter Keith (Voltron), kid Matt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2019-10-17 19:54:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17566961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allyoop_1/pseuds/allyoop_1, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolfy_P_Smith/pseuds/Wolfy_P_Smith
Summary: “They’re good kids.”They both take a moment to look over at said kids. Pidge has her elbows on the table, butt in the air as she finger smashes on her DS and Matt is picking at a tear in the booth and eating what comes out.“Well,” Keith says, turning back to Lance. “They’re…kids. Probably human.”Matt licks at the tear in the seam and Lance grins. “Debatable.”Or: Keith has two jobs, two kids, and a million problems. Shiro’s not the solution to all of them, but he sure does help.





	1. Chapter 1

Let it go on record that when Keith puts on his apron to serve, he’s a professional.

“There aren’t even that many customers in the building. I just can’t believe that our food took so long to get out to us,” the woman says, clearly in the beginnings of her “can I see a manager” speech. She leans forward and pitches her voice down like she’s performing for an Oscar. “My mashed potatoes were _cold_. Can you imagine if I had taken a _bite_ out of them?”

He’s a goddamn professional, but he’s _struggling_.

He knows her type. Fake nails, faker boobs, ten kids and her husband’s balls stowed away in a Subaru outside. Never fails to have some kind of incident at every meal. If it hadn’t been the food taking too long, it would have been her water having too many ice cubes. He’s seen it too many times for it to even be a surprise at this point, and he can’t figure out why it’s bothering him so much now.

“I really am sorry, ma’am,” he says in what should count as a valiant effort. “Our kitchen was a little backed up tonight---”

“A little backed up? Dasani and Sephora had to wait _twenty_ minutes for their corndogs, and then you forgot the ketchup.”

Keith spares a glance for the two little girls sitting in the booth beside the woman. For their sakes, he hopes she’s a stepmom.

He rallies. “That is unfortunate. Tell you what, how about I---”

“I want to see a manager.”

And roll credits. Keith pulls on what’s left of his customer service smile and grits out, “Sure thing. Let me grab them.”

He turns around and forces an even march back to the server station behind the bar. It’s only after he’s safely behind their wall of alcohol that he lets his smile fall. His friend Lance is the only one in the area and as soon as he sees Keith he barks out a laugh.

“Fun night?” he asks.

“The worst. Table 24 is giving me hell.”

“Sucks, man. Are they old?”

“Worse. Bitch has a Kate Gosselin haircut.”

“Jeez, man.”

Keith groans, slumping onto the bar. “I know. And now she wants a manager.” He peers up at Lance through his bangs. “You wouldn’t happen to know where any are, would you?”

Lance stares at him for a moment before his face splits in a grin. This is why Keith likes the guy. He’s dumb as shit and has no sense of personal boundaries, but he’s always down to help out a friend. Well, and stir up trouble.

He ceremoniously pulls off his serving apron and tosses it on the bar. “Lucky for you, I was just certified two seconds ago when you asked.”

“How convenient,” Keith says. “I hate to call on your managerial authority…”

“But duty calls. No need to explain, Keith.” He draws up to his full 5 feet, 10 inches and gestures toward the dining room. “Lead the way.”

Soccer Mom is rubbing hand sanitizer up and down her children’s arms as they approach, but when she sees them her lips pull back in a grin that shows off too many white-polished teeth.

“Hi folks, certified manager here,” Lance tells her, all smiles. “What can I do for you tonight?”

Soccer Mom sits up in her seat, looking glad he asked. She flicks a manicured finger Keith’s way. “Well, our food took _forever_ to come out. Dasani and Sephora had to wait _twenty minutes_ on their corndogs and _then…”_

Lance side-eyes Keith as the woman reprises her rant, and Keith has to physically restrain his smile by biting his lip. He can tell by the slant of his grin that Lance is about to throw down some major bullshit. It’s going to be a serious test of his customer service skills not to break character and laugh.

To his credit, Lance lets the woman make her way through most of her prepared speech before interrupting.

He heaves a put upon sigh. “Ma’am, I think we all know what the real problem here is. You aren’t exactly being subtle and frankly I’m disgusted.”

This seems to give her pause. “What do you mean?”

“Clearly you’re discriminating against my server because he’s bisexual.”

Mouth dropping, Soccer Mom gapes at them and Keith fights his grin. “You---he--- _what_?”

“Somehow you’ve worked out that our Keith here bats for both teams and you decided that you were going to harass him about it. Well let me tell you, you won’t be doing that through me.”

“ _I_ \---”

“Our company treats all of its employees equally. You think I care that Keith looks at my butt a little too long when I walk away? _No_ , because that would be discrimination and we don’t stand for that here.”

Keith contains his eye roll, but only just. Dream on, Lance.

 _“What_?” Soccer Mom seems to gain back the ability to speak, though her face has taken on an unflattering ruddy hue that bleeds all the way down to her neck. “I didn’t call you over because of--- I didn’t even know his sexuality!”

Lance tuts. “Even worse. It’s internalized.” He places a hand on Keith’s shoulder and leans into him. “Listen ma’am, we care deeply for our servers in this establishment. Keith here is like a son to me. Why, when my Nattie got sick, he was the only one to come visit us in the hospital---”

“Lance,” Keith murmurs and Lance continues, unperturbed.

“Point is, it doesn’t matter to me who he chooses to love, and if you’re going to continue this behavior then I’m going to have to ask you to leave the premises. Blatant biphobia is not tolerated in my restaurant---”

“I am _not_ being bi, uh, bi---” She clearly struggles over the word before waving her hands at Keith. “I don’t care that he’s gay. My _food_ was taking too long---”

“Please ma’am, you’re making a scene. I don’t want to have to call the police, but with this kind of behavior my hands might be tied.”

For the first time, the woman’s bravado seems to take a hit. “The police?”

Lance nods empathetically. “Company policy. Corporate takes these things very seriously, you understand.”  He throws a look around them before leaning a little closer and lowering his voice. “Listen, we don’t have to do that. I know your kids are here. Your husband won’t understand. How _embarrassing_ to explain to the Home Owner’s Association. How about we get you paid out and you can quietly take your leave before the other customers start asking questions. We’ll just pretend it didn’t happen. How’s that sound?”

The woman looks around them, eyes lingering on the tables closest to them who are all throwing curious glances their way. “Well, I don’t want any trouble...”

“Great!” Lance exclaims, clapping his hands together. “Keith, my boy, please bring this woman her check. As discreetly as possible, mind you.”

“Have it right here,” Keith says, mouth probably pulling a little too smug as he places the booklet in front of her. “Are you paying in cash or a card?”

“Um, well, cash…”

“Excellent!” Lance chirps, clapping again.

A couple of moments draw on where no one makes to move. The woman looks uncertainly between the two of them. When neither seems inclined to leave, she coughs and then gingerly rifles through her purse. She pulls out enough cash to cover the bill and looks up hesitantly at Lance. His smile doesn’t lessen as he continues to stare down at her. Her eyes flicker to Keith.

“Oh,” she says. “Um, your tip…”

She grabs a ten, pauses and considers, then pulls out another. Refusing eye contact, she hands the booklet to Keith.

“Thank you so much for coming in,” Lance says, grabbing Keith and already walking away. “You have a wonderful rest of your evening. Bye Fiji, bye Revlon!”

Keith has to hide his smile in his hand as they bypass the rest of the restaurant and take refuge behind the bar. They at least manage to duck behind some glasses before laughing together. 

Lance slaps him on the back and hits him with his best finger guns. “And that is how you show ‘em the old razzle dazzle!”

Keith laughs again. “I’ll give you that one. She was so pissed until you brought up the cops.”

“God, I am _such_ a good manager. I deserve a raise.”

“I’ll vouch for you.” He flips Soccer Mom’s booklet open and shakes his head, grinning. “I can’t even believe this. _Twenty bucks._ ” He smiles at Lance. _“_ Hey man, thanks. I thought I wasn’t gonna make shit on that one.”

Lance shrugs. “Pleasure was all mine, dude. Or should I say, _son_.”

“Oh god, don’t push it,” Keith laughs.

Lance grabs him and ruffles his hair. “My bisexual golden child. My boy.”

A voice from behind draws their attention. “Hey! Keith’s laughing! What did I miss?”

Hunk is peering out at them from the window into the kitchen. He pulls off his cook’s ball cap and wipes at the sweat collecting on his brow. Keith doesn’t envy him. The kitchen is always hot as hell, and they’ve been especially busy that night.

Leaning in and raising his voice to be heard over the kitchen’s fans, Lance shouts, “Oh nothing, just me throwing the performance of a lifetime and saving young Keith’s life.”

“Awww!” Hunk says. “I wanna hear the story!”

“I’ll tell you at home. It deserves your undivided attention.”

“That good, huh?”

“You have no idea, buddy.”

Keith sinks into a slouch against the bar, listening as his friends shout back and forth at each other. Now that he’s not fuming over a table or trying to control his poker face, he’s feeling the wear of the day tug on him again. God, he just wants his _bed_.

A buzzing in his apron pocket has him straightening. Pulling his phone out, he frowns down at the incoming call. Normally he would never answer for an unknown number, but he doesn’t have that privilege anymore. Striding into the kitchen and out of eyesight of customers, he hits accept.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Keith?”

“Matt?”  Immediately on high alert, Keith steals farther into the kitchen, free hand coming up to block out the extra noise. “Buddy, what’s wrong? Are you okay? Is Pidge okay?”

Matt hums. “Yeah, we’re okay.”

His voice sounds far away and Keith clutches the phone closer to his ear. “Where’s Katya? Matt?”

“She’s not here anymore. She left a while ago.”

“ _What_?” Keith’s heart seizes in his chest. “What do you mean she left? Where is she?”

“I don’t know. She just left. She said she would be back, but it’s been an hour.”

Jesus. So much could have happened in that hour. So much could _still_ happen. Fucking _Katya_. Serves him right for hiring some random woman in his apartment complex to babysit for him

He yanks his coat off the rack in the back and starts tugging it on. “Okay listen, Matt. Are you listening? I need you to lock the front door and make sure that---” He chokes as another thought hits him. “Wait, is Pidge there with you? _Matt_ , please tell me she’s with you.”

“Yeah, she’s here.”

Keith breathes out, shoulders slumping in relief. “Jesus. Okay.” He steels himself. “Listen, lock the door and don’t let anyone in, okay? Even if they say they’re a friend of Katya’s. Take your sister and stay in the living room. Turn on the TV or something, it doesn’t matter. I’m coming to get you. I’m on my way, okay? I’m leaving right now.”

“Okay.”

“Repeat what I said back to me.”

Matt dutifully recaps as Keith storms back to the bar. He pulls out the book he keeps his cash and notepad in and shoves it at Lance.

“Something came up, I have to---No, no, Matt buddy, I’m still here. Don’t hang up!  Give me a minute, just a minute---I have to get to the kids. Katya fucking _left_ them and they’re all alone at her place. I can’t even believe---”

He cuts off, too livid to finish the thought.

Lance accepts the book, mood instantly sobered, and Keith remembers the other reason he keeps him around. He’s surprisingly good in an emergency situation. “No problem, man. I’ll take care of this. You go to your kids.”

“Thank you, _thanks_. Could you let Honerva know? Please?”

“Yeah, I got you.”

Keith’s already pulling on his gloves and grabbing his bag from under the bar. “Matt, stay on the line, okay? I’m leaving now, but I’ll be there soon, okay?”

“Okay, I won’t hang up.”

Keith sends one last wave at Lance and Hunk before booking it outside. It’s late enough that the sun’s been  down for hours, but the city produces enough light pollution that he doesn’t have too hard a time navigating the streets. He’s lucky his apartment sits just a few blocks over from the restaurant; he’s too keyed up to be able to sit through a metro ride at this point.

He doesn’t quite run, but he’s definitely at a speed walk the entire way. When he finally makes it to his building there’s a horrible stich pulsing in his side.

“Matt,” he pants into the phone, sliding to a stop in front of Katya’s door. “Hey, I’m here. Open the door.”

“You said not to open the door for anyone.”

Of course the kid chooses now to be a smartass. Keith takes a deep breath and tells himself he’s not going to murder a six year old. “Open the door. _Now_.”

The door swings open with a click. Matt peers up at him from behind his clunky, oval-rimmed glasses, still clutching the phone up to his ear.

“Hi,” he says, like he hasn’t been the subject of Keith’s heart palpitations for the past twenty minutes. “You got here really fast.”

“I power-walked.” Keith pushes through the doorway, one hand wrangling Matt in. He peers around Katya’s dingy living room. “Katie?”

“Right here!”

Pidge’s mop of hair pops up from behind the couch. Keith waits for her to run over to them before pulling both kids in with a hand on their necks. They tuck into his stomach, one on either side, and he takes a moment to just breathe. The feel of their little breathing bodies under his arms shuts off the alarm that’s been blaring in his head since he got the call. As the panic recedes, it leaves behind bone-weary exhaustion and not a small amount of anger.

“Well, now that we’re all here I can properly murder both of you.”

Matt makes a noise of protest and pulls back to frown up at him. “It’s not our fault Katya left!”

“Yeah!” Pidge agrees. “You can’t murder us for something she did. That’s against the law!”

Keith narrows his eyes down at them. “So this wasn’t some kind of prank? You didn’t con her into leaving?”

“No! She probably ran out of drugs or something!”

Keith ignores that one because he is the adult here. Privately, he’s beginning to suspect Matt might be right. He still can’t shake the nagging suspicion that they had something to do with it though.

He sighs. “Seems I’m going to have to perform a lie detecting test. Who volunteers?”

“Nose goes!” Matt slaps a finger to his nose, so Keith turns to Pidge. She puts her tiny fists on her hips.

“I’m _five_. I haven’t learned how to lie yet.”

“That’d be a convincing argument if it wasn’t a lie itself.”

He drops down to her level, leaning in close enough to see the smattering of freckles across her nose, and squints as he forces them to meet gazes.

“Katie Kogane, did you or your brother trick Katya into leaving?”

There’s steal in her voice as she resolutely says, “Nope.”

There’s no eyebrow twitch or any of her other tells, but Keith keeps their gazes locked just to see her squirm. Not to be outdone, she stares right back, eyes narrowing to match his glower. She keeps leaning in until their noses touch and it startles a laugh out of Keith. They giggle together before he stands and ruffles her hair.

“Okay, you’re off the hook. Round up your stuff. We’re leaving.”

Both kids spring into action, swooping around the room and gathering their toys into the shark backpacks Lance had bought them for Christmas last year. A couple toys are ones he doesn’t recognize, but after the night Katya has put him through he’s not going to tell them to put them back. He also can’t lock her apartment from the outside, something she’s just going to have to deal with whenever she deigns to come home.

Keith’s apartment is on the top floor and he pops Pidge on his hip as they climb the stairs.

“I’m sorry, guys,” he says, steering Matt away from the gross bug on the third floor landing. “I should have found you a better babysitter. Katya obviously wasn’t a good choice.”

Pidge clamps a hand on his shoulder and yells into his ear, “I tried to tell you! She only buys strawberry Pop-Tarts.”

“Yeah, she was weird,” Matt says. “She had a bunch of creepy dolls in her room, but wouldn’t let us play with them. Their eyes were this big and would follow us!” He moves a hand in front of his head and mimes following it around with his eyes. “Definitely haunted.”

Keith sighs. He knows all of their grievances with Katya. He had a few of his own, namely that she told his kids cautionary Russian fairytales before bedtime that always seemed to feature a disproportionate amount of porridge and bears. (Matt to this day won’t touch oatmeal). But Katya had been convenient and cheap, so he’d looked past her shortcomings. Looks like those days are over.   

“Well,” he says, “we’re going to find you a new babysitter. One who doesn’t have possessed dolls or buy bad Pop-Tarts.”

Pidge hits his shoulder. “I don’t want a new babysitter! Why can’t you just watch us?”

“Yeah! You can stay home with us!” Matt agrees, tugging on Keith’s hand emphatically.

Keith sighs. They’ve had this conversation numerous times and it gets harder every time. “I want to, guys. So bad. I would love to stay home and hang out with you. But I have to work. Groceries don’t just buy themselves, you know.”

It’s not just an empty placation; he really would stay home with them. Even before they lived with him, Pidge and Matt were a huge part of his life. He loves them more than he ever thought possible and it kills him how much he has to be away. But what it comes down to, what it’s always come down to in his life, is money, and he has to work to make sure they never have to worry about it.

Pidge must notice the melancholic shift to his thoughts, because she pats at his face to get his attention.

“I can build you a robot that buys groceries,” she says. “I can even make it buy the right kinds of stuff, like the dinosaur nuggets instead of normal ones. Then you can stay home with us while it goes to the store!”

Keith smiles. He loves the way Pidge views the world. He wishes he still thought every problem could be saved through his own innovation.

He pretends to think about her offer, tapping a finger against his lip. “Could you program it to clean your and Matt’s room? And do the dishes? And pack your lunches? And walk Kosmo? And---”

Pidge smooshes a hand into his mouth, laughing. “It can’t do _everything_ , Keith! It’s just a robot!”

“Unless it’s an _alien_ robot!” Matt jumps in. “It could have all kinds of advanced technology that lets it do all sorts of stuff, like shoot missiles and bomb the army!”

“That’s an _android_ , you idiot! Completely different.”

“Depends on your definition of android,” Keith throws in, and they argue robot semantics the rest of the way up to the apartment.

They have Pop-Tarts, the good kind, for dinner because now that he knows his kids didn’t run Katya off he feels kind of terrible about the whole thing. He even lets Pidge feed their dog Kosmo the crusts. When both kids realize he’s being a pushover, they take full advantage of his guilt and pile on the couch and watch cartoons way past their bedtimes. Keith lets them, too busy scouring the internet for any kind of childcare he can afford. He applies for as many federally funded after-school programs as possible, though he’s tried those before and has never made the cut. He’s got to find _something_ , though, and soon. Without Katya, he has no one to watch his kids on his night shifts at the restaurant. It’s tough trying to find someone in the middle of the schoolyear, though. Most childcare facilities and individuals alike have their routines down and aren’t willing to accept on new charges. It’s going to take him some time to find one that has open enrollment and feels trustworthy. After Katya, he feels justifiably wary.

Once he’s wrangled his wayward children into their beds, he stops by his room and mournfully considers his own. It’s not much, just a full sized mattress on the floor and a couple mismatched comforters thrown together, but he thinks if he could just lay in it for a couple moments he’d never ask for anything again.

But he has another night shift the day after tomorrow and no one lined up to watch his kids for it. He rubs the heel of his palm into his eye, grabs a Dr. Pepper, and returns to his search.

***

He doesn’t find a babysitter that night.

He doesn’t find much of _anything_. In a city of 700,000, he thinks there would be at least one place that doesn’t cost his entire paycheck, force religion down children’s throats, or employ ex-felons. Money, especially, has been an issue. Apparently the only way to find adequate childcare in the area is to have enough money to not actually need it.

It’s also probably him, though. He’s still wary after the Katya incident. He’d just blindly handed his kids over to her since she lived nearby and seemed nice. He’s trusted some pretty shady people in his past, but it’s a little different when it’s his children he’s entrusting them with. Before the next one, he’s going to have to do a little more research.

That said, he’s still sitter-less for his next shift at the restaurant. Meaning he’s a little late, but not as late as he could have been with two children in tow.

“Yo Keith!” Lance calls to him as he walks in, and grins when he notices the two kids trailing behind him. “Hey, you’ve got some stragglers. Hi kids!”

“Hi Lance!”

“Lance!”

Keith lets the kids maul his friend as he clocks in and throws his bag on the booth he always shoves his kids into when they’re here. Swiping two juice boxes from behind the bar, he ducks to peek through the long window-ledge into the kitchen. He squints against the warmth coming off the heat lamps along the top edge.

“Hey Keith!” Hunk exclaims when he catches sight of him. Keith accepts the knuckle touch passed through the window.

“Hey, would you mind dropping some chicken strips and fries for me?”

Hunk cocks his head. “You not gonna ring ‘em in?”

“Nah, they’re on the down-low. Special order for some special little customers.”

“Your kids are here?” His entire face lights up and Keith places a single finger over his lips and grins. Rubbing his hands together, Hunk tosses a couple handfuls of fries down. “No prob, I got you buddy. Coming right up!”

“Thanks.” He makes a mental note to let Hunk beat him next time they play Mario Kart. He deserves it.

He puts the juice boxes down on the booth and pulls both kids from their animated talk with Lance to set them across from each other. Hands set firmly on the table, he leans over them.

“Okay listen, you two aren’t supposed to be here right now, so you’re going to be nice and quiet. No whining, no wandering, and _no_ _fighting_. Comprende?”

Matt gets that stubborn set to his jaw and Keith readies himself for the bullshit. “What’s in it for us?” 

“Yeah, what’s in it for us?” Pidge echoes and Keith would roll his eyes if it wasn’t so cute.

“Chicken strips.”

Identical sets of brown eyes light up. Pidge shoots to her knees.

“French fries too?”

He points a finger at her nose. “If you’re good. Your DS’s are in my bag. Sit quietly and I’ll bring you your food.”

Maybe bribing your kid with food isn’t good parenting, but he’s not technically a parent so it probably doesn’t count. He leaves them, hoping to god they keep to themselves tonight. He isn’t sure who’s managing, but if it’s who he thinks it is they can’t afford any unwanted attention.

Lance leans on the counter beside him as he hastily pulls his hair back into something resembling a ponytail. It’s already a tad damp from his cross-city excursion this afternoon, and he paws ineffectually at his bangs to get them to lie flat.

“Still can’t find anyone to watch them?” Lance asks.

“No,” he sighs. “I think Katya cursed me. Her grandmother was Russian. Don’t Russian grandmothers cast curses or something?”

Lance snickers. “Babushka magic.”

“Yeah. You would think it would be a little easier to find someone. It’s not like we’re in a small town or something. And they’re good kids.”

They both take a moment to look over at said kids. One has her elbows on the table, butt in the air as she finger smashes on her DS and the other is picking at a tear in the booth and eating what comes out.

“Well,” Keith says, turning back to Lance. “They’re…kids. Probably human.”

Matt licks at the tear in the seam and Lance grins. “Debatable.”

Keith rounds the back of the bar and starts setting himself up for the night. He’s bartending, which is probably his favorite of all his shifts in the restaurant. The bar is essentially two long strips of counters situated right in front of the window into the kitchen. The aisle between the kitchen and the first counter is where the servers place orders and wait for their food to come up in the kitchen window. It’s also where everyone congregates to talk shit on their customers and whoever is managing for the night. Keith almost always faces this direction rather than towards his customers who sit on the other side of the second counter. He never said he was a good bartender.

The space between his customers and the servers is where Keith makes drinks and talks with his bar guests. When he’s bartending, he’s the only person allowed between the two counters. He used to let people come back and make their own drinks when they were busy, but Kathy Cataldo ruined that when she snitched on him for hiding contraband mozzarella sticks behind the tequila. She was fired a year ago, but he’s still not allowed to bring food behind the bar so no one but him is allowed to go behind the bar when he’s working.    

Lance follows along after him as he gets ready for the night, picking lazily at the plastic wrap on some of the fruit containers but not making a move to actually open them.

“They keep you late at the garage this morning?” he asks. He lazily reaches for the whipped cream canister and Keith has to smack his hand away.

“No, but after my shift I had to pick the kids up from school and then come straight here. We didn’t even have time to stop home first.”

Lance hums. “That explains this.” He tugs Keith’s black dress shirt from his pants and redoes the buttons in the correct holes. Keith hasn’t even realized, but to be fair he’d had to button them one handed, other hand raised in a certain one fingered salute at the guy across the train car who’d wolf whistled at him in his undershirt.

“Thanks man,” he says, re-tying his apron over the shirt. “We projecting for a busy night?”

“I don’t know. Let’s ask Hunk.”

He walks out from behind the bar and ducks under the kitchen window, yelling to be heard over the fans in the kitchen. “Yo Hunk! It gonna be a busy night?”

Hunk shrugs with a smile. “Let’s see!” He grabs a small handful of fries, shakes them in his cupped hands, and tosses them down on the ledge. Lance pushes on his toes and presses in impatiently as Hunk examines their configuration with a hand on his chin. Keith rolls his eyes. French fry divination is a game they’ve played since they all three began working their first year of undergrad. It’s ridiculous and he doesn’t put much stock in the whole practice, but can’t deny that he’s also waiting for the verdict.

“Mmmm,” Hunk tuts. “We’re in for a long one.”

“Aww man, I trusted you guys,” Lance grouses at a fry before popping one in his mouth. He wipes his hand on his apron before pushing at Keith’s shoulder. “By the way, you have a table.”

“What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Lance shrugs. “Forgot. They’ve been here a while.”

Keith groans. People aren’t generally nice when they have to wait any length of time, and he’s been here at least ten minutes. No telling how long they were here before that.

He steers himself around the bar and towards his section for the night. “Wish me luck, I guess. Hopefully they’re not old.”

Lance winks at him. “Nope, just another soccer mom.”

“Ha fucking ha.”

It’s going to be a long night.

Keith doesn’t mind the job. Most of the time he even likes it. He’s good at thinking on his feet and keeping a running tally of what needs to be done for each table. It’s a good kind of pressure when they get busy, a thrill under his skin that keeps him bouncing from table to table. After a morning spent fixing cars for less than nothing, though, and a week of similarly busy days, he’s feeling the strain in his feet and temper. The only thing he wants to be bouncing into is his bed, and that’s not looking likely anytime soon.

“I don’t think this day is ever going to fucking end,” Keith groans later that night. They’ve been through their main rush of customers, and now they’re waiting on the stragglers. His kids have eaten and true to their word are sitting quietly on their tech. It’s some kind of god sent miracle, and Keith hasn’t pushed his luck by engaging with them.

He’s taking a much needed break at the edge of the bar near the kitchen, resting his feet and digging his knuckles into his face. Before he can even enjoy the pressure on his tired eyes, his hands are ripped away, a saccharine smile and sharp eyes swimming into focus in front of him.

“Uh-uh, that’s how you develop wrinkles. You really should keep better mind of your appearance, love,” Lotor says in the British accent he’d picked up after spending two weeks in the UK that summer. He smirks, hand coming up to tap at his jaw. “Or what you can, at least.”

Glaring, Keith places a hand over the scar that cuts down his cheek and into his jawline. Lotor knows how sensitive he is about that one. Fuck. Out of all the managers that could have been in tonight and it’s fucking Lotor.

It’s not that Keith hates Lotor. He’s kind of funny when he forgets that his mom owns the restaurant and stops acting like a stuck-up white kid with money. Even the obnoxiously bleached white hair is tolerable when he regales them with funny anecdotes about his time abroad or makes everyone a shit ton of free food on slow nights. It’s only when he’s managing that he starts acting like he’s not also a server every other night just like everyone else.

Keith sneaks a glance at his kids. Still quiet, but he sees Pidge’s foot jiggling, a sure sign that she’s getting restless.

Lance scoffs, pulling him back into the conversation. “Keith doesn’t need any help in that department. He’s got a butt _and_ a mullet.”

Lotor rakes appraising eyes down Keith’s form, and he feels an irrational urge to cover his chest. “Yes, I suppose you do have that rugged, grease-monkey look to you. Some people go for that, I suppose.” He lifts his nose. “Me, I look for a man with a little more class. _Enterprise_.”

Keith can’t keep himself from rolling his eyes. “You’re just looking for a man with enough money to replace daddy after he stopped paying off your DUI’s.”

Lance barks out a laugh. “Yeah, you don’t need class, you need _cash_.”

They snicker together as Lotor looks down his nose at them.

“I’ll have you remember that I am your _manager_ \---” he begins, but Lance cuts him off.

“Pfffft, you’re a shift leader, dude. Your powers are limited to swiping coupon discounts and yelling at David when he hides his vodka in the walk-in.”

Keith wants to laugh with him, but Lotor has reminded him why he really doesn’t want to piss him off tonight. Lotor power trips like nobody else when he’s allowed to be shift leader. If he catches sight of Keith’s kids and realizes Keith’s keeping them there while he’s on the clock, there’s no telling what he’ll do. Getting reported to their store manager might be favorable to whatever stunt he would pull.

He throws another glance over Lotor’s shoulder and this time Lotor notices.

“What has you so captivated over there---?” he says, starting to pivot and look around. Keith freezes. He knows he needs to do something, and fast, but his entire body locks up. He can only stare in horror as Lotor’s narrow-eyed gaze swings around towards---

 “Fucking hell!”

Both Lotor and Keith jump back from the bar as Keith’s Dr. Pepper washes across the counter and both their laps. Brushing at his soaked apron, Keith glares up at a smiling Lance.

“Oh, sorry!” he says, looking nowhere sheepish enough under his Cheshire grin. “My hand slipped. Want me to get you a wet napkin, Lotor?”

Lotor’s already dabbing at a spot on his previously pristine white shirt. His lips pull back over his teeth as he spits, “This will require quite a bit more than water to clean. It’s _twill_.”

“Oh no,” Lance says. He turns to Keith. “It’s twill.”

Lotor is less than amused. “You may laugh all you want, but this shirt costs more than your week’s paycheck. Don’t think I won’t make you compensate for ruining it.”

He turns on his heel and heads for the manager’s office in the back. Once he’s out of sight, Keith breathes a sigh of relief as he slumps against the edge of counter not covered in soda.

“Thanks, man,” he says. “I really owe you for that one.”

Lance waves him off. “No problemo. I did us both a favor. He’s gonna be back there the rest of the night using his tears to clean his shirt.”

Keith snorts. He pulls himself to his feet and stretches out his back.

“Well, we only have an hour left until close. Hopefully the kids will stay out of his way until I finish up and we can head out.” He sighs, rubbing at his eyes. “God, I hope I can find someone to watch them before my shift tomorrow. I can’t do another night like this.”

“Tomorrow night? I could watch them.”

Keith raises an eyebrow and Lance makes an affronted noise. “What, I’ve done it before. Just let me call off a meeting I have with my chem professor and I’ll---”

Keith firmly shakes his head and cuts him off. “No way, Lance. I can’t let you reschedule for me. Go to your meeting. I’ll figure something out.”

“Are you sure? It’s really not that big of a deal.”

“I’m absolutely sure,” he says. There’s no way he would let Lance rearrange his schedule because he hasn’t got his shit together yet. “I’ll work something out.”

“Okay,” Lance drawls out tentatively. “But if you change your mind…”

“I won’t.”

A couple more customers pass through as the night goes on. There aren’t any big games on TV, so he gets few people wanting to sit at the bar. The other servers keep him busy making drinks, so he doesn’t get too bored. He’s on what will probably be his last customer of the night, a guy who’s probably had one too many, when he sees a head of wild hair pop up at the edge of the bar. Keith does a quick check of the surrounding area, but Lotor is nowhere in sight.

Matt smiles serenely at him as Keith makes his way over.

“I’d like a cherry Dr. Pepper,” he says. “Under the rocks, please.”

“Make that a double.” Pidge struggles up onto the seat beside him, little legs kicking until she rights herself.

Keith crosses his arms and hums. “Unfortunately, we have a strict no minors policy in this establishment. I’ll have to see a valid form of ID from both of you.”

Pidge’s nose wrinkles. “A what?”

“Identification. A card with your name on it.”

“We don’t have that,” Pidge says and Keith shrugs.

“No can do then.” He bends to pull out two more juice boxes from the fridge and slams them down on the counter. “Looks like it’s more juice for you.”

“But _Keith_.”

“No buts. It’s way too late for caffeine anyway.”

Matt wiggles in his seat a little and Keith belatedly notices him fiddling with something in his lap. Before he can ask, the kid slams something down on the bar and grins up at him smugly. It’s a Dairy Queen card, four out of the five holes punched out towards a free blizzard. Keith raises his brows as he flips the card over in his hand. Matt’s written his name on the back with a green crayon.

“What’s this supposed to be?” Keith asks.

“My form of identification.” Matt pushes his glasses up on his nose and beams. “Look, it has my name.”

Keith has to fight a smile. Matt is always surprising him with his big brain. By being a smartass, of course, but still.

“Okay first of all, where did you even get this?”

“I found it at Katya’s house.” He points at the text on the side. “Read it, it says I get free ice cream!”

Pidge punches at his arm and he rolls his eyes.

“Pidge can have some too cuz she’s the one that reached under the couch to get it,” he amends.

Keith eyes them both for a moment. He can’t deny that they’ve been pretty good for the night. He hadn’t heard any squabbling and neither had even so much as gotten up for a potty break.

“Form of identification accepted,” he finally says and the two break out in cheers. “Chocolate on both?”

Matt rolls his eyes again. “Uh, yeah. What are we, animals?”

“Don’t push it.” Keith sends him a look as he codes in two free birthday sundaes to the system. He shoos them back to their booth to wait for ice cream.

The man at the bar needs to be cashed out and then he has to make a couple of drinks for Nyma, their other server. By then, Lance is trying to hail his attention.

“Yo, Keith,” he says, holding up two bowls of ice cream. “Your food sold, man. These for your kids or do I need to run them to a table?”

“Just my kids,” Keith says. He flicks his head towards their booth. “You can take it over. You’ll be their hero for the rest of the night.”

“ _Sweet_.”

Keith smiles as his kids light up at the sight of ice cream. He’s right, Lance becomes the man of the hour as he sets each bowl down with a flourish.

“I’m going to need two spoons!” Keith hears Pidge say.

Lance offers her a fist bump and another spoon. “Good call, my young Padawan.”

Keith resists the urge to roll his eyes. This is why he limits the kids’ time with Lance. He doesn’t want them negatively affected.

It only takes him 15 minutes to clean up his tables and the bar, and ten to roll all the silverware he needs to finish up his side work. After gathering his receipts for the night and counting out his earnings, he does some mental math and sighs. He’ll definitely need to take another shift this weekend.

It’s when he’s almost ready to clock out that Lance says, “Hey, where’d your kids go?”

Something in Keith’s neck pulls dangerously as his gaze snaps to the booth he’d left them in. True to Lance’s word, it’s empty.

“Fucking shit,” he growls out, scanning across the front of the restaurant and finding no trace of his wayward children. His heart skips a beat when he thinks of how easily they could have snuck past them all and walked straight out the door. He takes a few lurching steps forward before someone clears their throat behind him.

“Keith, darling. Would these happy little sprogs happen to belong to you?”

Lotor’s smile is entirely pleasant, even as he maintains a death grip on each of Keith’s children in front of him. For their part, they both look guilty, eyes averted and shoulders by their ears. Keith’s body drops some of its tension. With Lotor or not, at least he knows they’re not dead on the street somewhere.

Lotor continues, “I found them arms deep in the ice machine. Naughty things. So many health code violations.”

Keith mentally flips through his options. He’s not sure how to salvage the situation, and this time Lance’s clumsiness isn’t going to bail him out.

“I’m sorry, Lotor. I lost track of them,” he tries. “They were only here a couple of minutes---”

“The surplus of used juice boxes on that booth says otherwise.”

Keith flinches. He throws a glance over at Lance, but the other subtly brings his hands up, clearly at just as much a loss as Keith.

He decides to go for the truth.

“Okay,” he sighs out, shoulders slumping in defeat. “They’ve been here since I got here. But I had nowhere else to take them. Their babysitter suddenly isn’t working out and I haven’t had time to find---”

“This is a restaurant, not your personal daycare.”

Keith’s hackles raise. He hates when people talk to him like he’s less than them. “I’m not using it as my daycare. It was only for today.”

“It doesn’t matter how long it was for. You brought them into a dangerous situation---”

Keith scoffs. “Dangerous. They were just sitting there and drinking juice, Lotor. It’s not like I let them loose in the kitchen armed with knives.”

“Didn’t you? You obviously lost track of them at some point if they had time to make it all the way back to the ice machine.” Lotor moves one of his hands to Matt’s neck, tilting his head back so he can croon down at him. “Poor darlings could have hurt themselves so _easily_.”

Keith feels tension coil in his muscles and it takes everything he has not to rip Matt away from Lotor’s touch. “It was only a couple of minutes. I was already looking for them when you brought them out.”

“And in those couple of minutes how many accidents could they have gotten into?”

“I had a handle on it.”

“You obviously didn’t.”

“Don’t act like you know anything about taking care of children, Lotor.”

“It would seem that neither do you---”

“Oh, _fuck you_ \---”

“That’s enough.” Lotor’s tone rings final. He ticks off on his fingers. “Violating health code, stealing company property, letting children run rampant through a kitchen full of hot machines and sharp knives. I should have you fired for this.”

All the rage flowing through his veins is extinguished with that one phrase. Panic seeps in and colors his vision at the edges. Eyes flickering down to where his kids are still caught in Lotor’s grip, he swallows whatever was left of his pride.

“Listen. Lotor,” he says, voice thin. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought them in. And I shouldn’t have yelled. I’m _sorry_. None of this will happen again, okay? I promise. Just let me come back in tomorrow.”

Lotor’s gaze remains detached and Keith realizes he’s not above begging.

“I can’t lose this job, Lotor. _Please_.”

Lotor lets his pathetic plea sit between them for a moment. The stillness eats away at Keith’s composure and he’s not sure how much longer he can stand Lotor’s eyes on him when he feels cracked open like this. It’s what Lotor’s relishing in, he realizes, as another slow smirk steals across the man’s face.

“Okay Keith,” he says, words slow as molasses. “I won’t go to Honerva with this.”

He releases Pidge and Matt, and they both fall into Keith. Wrapping arms around both of their shoulders, Keith exhales.

“Thanks,” he spits out. He can’t look anyone in the eye, ashamed or embarrassed or a little bit of both. “Like I said, it won’t happen again.”

“I know it won’t.”

He starts to usher his kids towards their coats in the booth, desperate to be out of the situation, but he’s stopped by a hand on his shoulder.

“I won’t tell Honerva,” Lotor says again, “but your behavior from tonight was unacceptable. It will be remembered.”

Keith jerks out from under Lotor’s grip and marches his kids away. He got the message loud and clear. Lotor won’t snitch on him, but at some point there’s going to be a price to pay for his discretion.

He lets the door slam on his way out. The temperature outside has dropped low enough that Keith can see his breath unfurl in front of him on every exhale, but he doesn’t feel it, blood pounding so hard he can feel it pulse in his temple.

“Keith, we’re really sorry---”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“We could just tell your boss we got lost---”

“You two have done more than enough.”

Matt’s silent after that, probably because Keith’s mood is written plainly across his face. He stalks through pools of streetlight, tugging both kids along with him. 

He hates when people talk to him like Lotor did. He fucking hates it. He knows he’s not a good parent. He’s not even a _parent_ , so how is he supposed to help it? It’s not like there’s some training manual or some shit for this. He was just thrown in and expected to fucking take care of two kids with no prior knowledge. That Lotor said anything to him when he’s trying so hard makes his blood run hot in his veins. _Fuck_ Lotor, fuck him and his stupid condescending smile. He has no idea what he’s talking about. 

And then he’d threatened Keith’s job. They aren’t best friends by any means, but Lotor knows that Keith doesn’t have any extra money. He barely has money, _period_. Maybe Lotor never planned to actually snitch on him, never planned to get him fired at all, but the fact that he used it as leverage against him when Keith is barely making it as it is makes his stomach turn. Thanks to his rich parents, Lotor’s never had to worry about money or going hungry or finding a warm place to sleep for the night. Keith has, and tonight was a horrible reminder of that panic. He can’t lose his job, not when he’s living day to day like this. The first month he doesn’t scrounge up enough rent they’re out. His landlord's already made that clear. After that, there’s no way the courts will let him keep the kids. They’ll be gone, pushed off into the system just the same as he was at their age. Who even knows if they’d get to stick together. Where would he be if the courts hadn’t agreed that he should be allowed to stick together with---

Something tugs hard in his chest and he cringes back from the thought. It doesn’t matter anyway. He’s not going to lose his job, even if he has to murder Lotor in cold blood to keep it. He could do it, he thinks. There’s enough rage coiled in his arms right now, he could put one of his fists right through his stupid fucking smile--- 

“Keith?”

Some of the haze clears from Keith’s mind at Matt’s timid voice. Abruptly he realizes that he’s been pulling them both along behind him and that Pidge especially is stumbling over her feet to keep up. Slowing to a stop, he drops both their hands and pushes the heels of his palms into his eyes.

He pulls in a breath, holds it, and lets it out in one large exhale. His heart’s still beating double time, but now that he’s stopped the frigid air is finally able to take the edge of his anger. When he wrangles enough control over himself to drop his hands, he finds Matt and Pidge staring warily up at him.

He sighs. He’s such an asshole.

Extending both palms forward, he’s grateful when neither hesitates to take them in their own. He sets a slow pace this time, careful of short legs as they make their way down the street.

“C’mon, let’s get home.”

***  

Because he’s expecting it, he’s fully awake that night when his door creaks open. There’s the soft patter of feet on carpet and then the lurch of the mattress as a body collides with it. His arm is already open and ready when Pidge curls up against his side, little hand coming up to settle over his chest and knees tucking under his ribs.

They lay like that for a bit. It’s quiet except for Kosmo’s snoring and the distant sound of midnight traffic from his window. Keith pets at her hair, gently pulling out the tangles and smoothing them back from her forehead. For a moment he thinks she might have fallen asleep, but then she begins fiddling with the peeling letters on the Pistons hoodie he’s wearing.

“Are you mad at us?” she asks, voice small in the dark of his bedroom.

“No,” he says, fingers still moving through her hair. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Matt and I got you in trouble.”

“I got myself in trouble. You just happened to get caught in the middle of it.”

She tugs off a large chunk of the T on his shirt and flicks it to the side. “You got yelled at. By your boss.”

“Eh, Lotor’s just a jerk. And not my real boss, so it’s okay.”

“His smile was scary. Matt said he’s a vampire.”

Keith snorts. “He’s not a vampire. Maybe some kind of evil elf or something.”

She’s quiet again, and he switches to rubbing her back. It’s been a sure-fire method to get her to sleep ever since she was a baby.

“Matt also said if you get fired we’ll be taken away by the cops.”

His hand stops. “No, no of course not,” he says, wondering where Matt would have even heard that. “I would never let that happen.”

“That’s what happened to you and Mommy, wasn’t it? You got taken away?”

Keith feels like the air has been knocked out of him. “Who told you that?”

Pidge shrugs, avoiding his gaze. “Matt said Mommy told him.”

Of course she had. Acxa always believed in giving it straight to her kids.

“Well, your mom and I… we were in a very different situation.”

“Why?”

“For starters, we weren’t taken away by the police. Our mom just couldn’t take care of us anymore.”

“Cuz she was fired?”

He chuckles and moves a hand to stop her from completely ruining his hoodie with her picking. “No, not because she was fired. That’s not how it works. Matt’s not always right, you know.”

 She plants her chin into his sternum and looks up at him with furrowed brows. “He saw it on a YouTube video, though. It was a documentary.”

“Matt also watches documentaries about lizard people and aliens,” he says, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “Trust me, that’s not how it works, okay?”

She seems to think about it for a moment, eyes unfocused under her bangs, before accepting it with a nod. Laying her head back down, she asks, “Why else was it different? For you and Mommy?”

“Well,” he sighs, letting his head thunk back into the pillow as well. “The biggest difference is that you and Matt have me, and I’m never going to let anything happen to you.”

“You and Mommy didn’t have any other family?”

Something lodges in his throat, so his throat rasps when he says, “Nope.”

 “But you had each other?”

“Yeah, we did.”

Keith’s chest aches. It hurts every time one of the kids brings Acxa up, but especially when he thinks about their childhood. He can’t not talk about her though. For all that it hurts to think of her, he doesn’t ever want Matt or Pidge to feel like they can’t ask about her. They’ve already lost so much; he can’t take her memory away too.

He pats lightly at Pidge’s back. “You don’t have to worry about stuff like that, though. Even if I was fired, I would just find a new job. Everything would be fine. You’re always going to have me, okay?”

She’s quiet for a long time, so he says, “I mean it, Pidge. It’ll all be alright. Even if the president turns out to be an alien.”

She giggles, shaking her head. “No, Matt said he’s a lizard person.”

“Lizard person then. Either way, it’s going to turn out alright. We always make it through, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she agrees, and he smiles up at the ceiling.   

He starts rubbing at her back again and she snuggles deeper into his side. He can’t see her face, but he feels her weight gradually start to sink into his side as her breathing evens out. He’s glad for it; there were a lot of heavy thoughts running around in that little brain of hers, and Matt’s as well it seemed. They were much too heavy for kids as young as they were. He makes a mental resolve to start working on it. He doesn’t want them worrying about money or food and he especially doesn’t want them ever thinking about being forced to leave him. He’s going to have to work harder to keep them from seeing that side of his life.

He’s interrupted from his musings by a soft noise at his chest.

“Keith?”

Pidge must be just at the edge of sleep. He hums to show he’s listening and she clumsily moves her hand up to rest on his neck.

“Do you ever miss Mommy?”

The ache returns full force and he sighs under its weight.

“Yeah.” His voice comes out rough, so he clears his throat. “I miss her a lot.”

“Me too.”

A ragged breath in. “I know you do, sweetheart.”

A couple moments pass and she starts snoring lightly. It only takes ten minutes before another small body slips into his bed and wiggles under his free arm, caging him in.  His kids tucked in on either side, he holds his heartache close to his chest and waits for sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Shiro is in the next chapter, promise :)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who left kudos and commented on the last chapter. It was all such nice feedback! As promised, here's some Shiro.

Sunday mornings are laundry day, even when Matt insists he hasn’t started to smell yet.

Weekends are the only time Keith ever gets off from his morning shifts at the garage and he makes sure to spend the time before his restaurant shifts with his kids. Growing up, weekends had always been somewhat of a challenge for him, dodging aggressive foster siblings or fighting for his share of food. He doesn’t want that for his own kids. They can’t really afford to do much, but he figures spending time together is at least something, even if it is just to do laundry.

He bundles both kids up, packs two trash bags full of dirty clothes, and hustles them all down to the laundromat down the street. Scrubby Duds is trashy, even by his standards. Half the washers don’t work and the one good dryer eats every other quarter. He used to frequent a different laundromat a metro stop away, but the guy who owns it caught Keith putting his clothes in other people’s dryers once and hasn’t let him in since. Which is fine. He just does it at Scrubby Duds now.

Matt and Pidge love the little shithole. Pidge never fails to find some disgusting rodent or fungus behind the dryers to freak Keith out with. Matt never fails to find a way to lick whatever disease-ridden thing Pidge has found for the day. Keith never fails to be amazed just how compatible their weirdness is.

To protect them both from themselves, Keith always brings along a variety of coloring pages and all the colored pencils he can find in the junk drawer.  Today they’re spread across a table near the back. It’s conveniently out of sight of the lone security camera, so he can gyp his washing machines out of free cycles in peace.

He’s got his toaster of a laptop out and is sifting through a babysitter forum when the inevitable fight breaks out.

“Matt,” Pidge whines, “stop coloring so hard! You’re gonna break the pencils.”

“I’m coloring a werewolf, it has to be really dark.”

“That’s stupid. It doesn’t even look like a werewolf.”

“Yeah, well yours is stupid too.”

“Hey!” Pidge yells and Keith sees movement out of the corner of his eye. “Keith! Matt messed mine up.”

He pushes his laptop back a bit to focus on his kids. Matt and Pidge wear identical angry pouts, right down to the flare of red across their noses.

He says, “How about we all keep our hands and colored pencils to ourselves. Worry about your own page.”

“Matt colored on mine!”

“Pidge was being a jerk.”

Keith digs a knuckle into his eye, sighing. “Matt, don’t draw on Pidge’s page. Pidge, don’t be a jerk.”

Pidge crosses her arms, her coat puffing out and making her look like a little green marshmallow.

“Matt was the one being a jerk,” she says. “He was gonna break the pencil, and I need the brown for my tree.”

Matt mirrors her stance, mouth twisted. “Well, I needed the brown for my werewolf.”

“Your werewolf that sucks!”

Keith sees it coming a mile away, so he’s able to intercept Matt’s hand before it connects with Pidge’s shoulder.

“Okay,” he says, moving to stand between their chairs. “We’re doing separate activities now. Pidge, you get my phone for half an hour. Matt, we’re still coloring.”

Pidge cheers as he hands her his phone and sends her across the table. She jams his headphones in and starts watching god knows what on YouTube. He probably should have some kind of parental lock on that.

Matt doesn’t look happy. His arms are still crossed as he levels a glare down at the table.

Keith sits beside him. “Sorry buddy. I have a couple documentaries saved that you can watch when it’s your turn.”

Matt just grunts. Keith pulls his drawing over and tries to hand him the brown pencil.

“Wanna keep coloring?”

Matt shrugs, so Keith pretends to start shoving the pencil up his nose. It does the trick. Matt slaps a hand over his nose and giggles, batting Keith’s hand away. Keith hands him the pencil and his smile droops again.

“It looks stupid,” he says, covering his drawing with a hand.

Keith makes an affronted noise. “It’s not stupid. That’s a damn good werewolf.”

“Pidge said it was bad.”

“Oh, so you care what Pidge thinks now?”

“No,” Matt says, still not looking reassured. He swivels in his chair, turning wide, imploring eyes on Keith. “Can you help me? You’re really good at art.”

He sniffles a little, arm coming up to wipe his nose on his shirt sleeve. He’s been fighting a small cold the past couple of days. It’s not anything life threatening, but it makes him look just pathetic enough that Keith can’t say no to him.

“Sure thing,” Keith says. “Scoot over.”

Matt beams up at him. He slides the drawing in between them. “Okay, he’s going to be fighting a vampire, but the vampire is way less good at fighting than him so he’s definitely going to win, but it’s a super close fight because they’re both using their powers! Put the vampire right here.”

He taps at a place on the right side of the page. Keith spares a glance for the half colored werewolf and places the brown pencil in Matt’s hand again.

“How about I work on the vampire and you finish your werewolf?”

Matt frowns. “But then it won’t look good next to what you draw.”

“Number one, you have a much better idea of how a werewolf fights compared to me. I’m not an expert like you.” He pokes Matt in the belly for an extra giggle. “And two, it’s way more fun to draw together, yeah?”

 Matt considers this, brows furrowed as he thinks it through, before nodding up at Keith.

“Yeah,” he says. “But make sure the vampire isn’t as good as the werewolf at fighting.”

 “Sure.”

When it’s finished, the werewolf and vampire are engaged in what looks like a pretty impressive battle. The werewolf is bleeding from its side, but the vampire has lost multiple appendages, the clear loser in the fight. 

“Wow Keith, that’s so cool!” Matt exclaims, tracing over the vampire’s bared fangs. “I want to be able to color like you when I’m older.”

“Just keep practicing, bud.”

He flexes his hand.  It’s been so long since he’s drawn anything, for fun or otherwise, and it’s like prodding at an old wound. He’s missed it. There’d been a time when he’d really thought he was going to make a career out of it. He’d even landed a pretty swanky internship right before graduation, one in an animation company he’d admired since childhood. Acxa had been so proud she’d bought him the expensive charcoal set he’d been eyeing for months. He hasn’t touched it since.    

“Can we put it on the fridge?” Matt asks.

Keith eyes the blood splashed across the page (Matt had been pretty liberal with the red pencil).

“How about we put it in your drawing pad for safe keeping?” he says.

Matt beams up at him and sneezes on his jacket in agreement.

“Aw thanks, buddy,” Keith says, wiping the snot off with a coloring page. “Good thing I just washed this.”

Matt jumps into a new drawing, this one featuring what might be a pterodactyl. Keith considers joining him, maybe creating a cartoon panel like the ones he used to make in high school, but he settles for watching instead.

Motion from his laptop draws his attention. He’d left it open and wasting power, but he notices a new message notification at the top of his Facebook feed.

He hates Facebook. There’s no one in the world he wants to communicate with that doesn’t already have his number, and he’d rather let people from his past stay in his past. It’s full of bullshit and lies anyway. If the way people portrayed their lives on Facebook was realistic, it would be a hell of a lot more depressing and not nearly as addicting.

Acxa had been the one to bully him into getting it. She was always good at that. Forcing everyone into doing what she wanted, bending the universe to her will. She’d thought he’d be able to use it to forge business connections and show his art to the world. Now he just stalks old college acquaintances and checks to make sure Lance isn’t doing anything too life threatening on a daily basis.

The message is from a woman he doesn’t know, one he’s not friends with and doesn’t recognize. The picture is too small for him to see much detail, so he clicks on the message.

 _Keith_ , it reads.

_I hope this message doesn’t come as a shock, but I saw your profile on Adoption.com. I have been searching for my son for many years and you share several similarities with him. I was hoping you could shed a little light on some of these._

Keith mentally sighs. He gets messages like these from time to time, desperate parents searching for: Son, DOB 10/23/96, born in El Paso, Texas, black hair and dark eyes. Acxa had put their profiles up on one of those stupid websites years ago. She’d always been more interested in finding their birth parents than he was. There’s not usually much he can do for these people and he’s just about to click out of the message when the next part catches his eye. 

_I was in contact with your sister Acxa some months ago, but she has since stopped her messages._

Acxa was in contact with this woman? He didn’t believe it. There’s no way she wouldn’t have told him if there was someone she thought could be their mother. Sure he didn’t like talking about their birth parents and hated that she wouldn’t let it go, but that didn’t mean she would have kept it a secret. They shared _everything_ with each other, and this was way bigger than their usual problems. There’s absolutely no way.

The message blurs as he quickly finishes it, but the rest just a generic plea for him to write back. If it weren’t for the part about Acxa, it could be any other message he’s received through the years.

The icon at the top of her message catches his eye again. It’s too grainy to make much out, just a woman with wisps of black hair framing her narrow face. He hovers the mouse over the picture, but hesitates before he can click it. He scans the message once more before exiting out of Facebook and shutting the laptop.

It’s just like any of those other messages he’s received. He’ll write back that he’s half Korean and won’t get a response back. He’s not what the woman is looking for.  

He makes Pidge hand over his phone to Matt and switches out their laundry. He doesn’t break out his laptop for the rest of their time there, but it lingers in his peripheries, always on the edge of his thoughts.

*******

That night marks the third time in a week where Keith finds himself at work and completely preoccupied by his kids.

He’d grudgingly taken Lance up on his offer to watch them during his shift, though it had almost killed him to ask. Normally he’d just suffer through something rather than sink so low as to bother someone else with his problems, but he’s at his rope’s end. It’s been nearly a week since the Katya incident, and he still doesn’t have a babysitter. He’s almost desperate enough to go back to her, but he always remembers the panic that had swept through his body when he’d gotten Matt’s call and neatly drops the idea. Something will come up; it always does.

It doesn’t stop him from worrying in the meantime, though. Lance isn’t half bad with kids, but he is three IQ points away from being a diagnosed dumbass.

His voice is much too cheerful when Keith calls to check in, and Keith is immediately suspicious. 

“You’re being a helicopter parent, man,” Lance says. “Relax, your kiddos are in the safest place in the whole city. With me.”

There’s a muffled crash in the background, followed by twin peals of laughter. 

“Mhm, and what was that?” Keith asks.

 “Oh, just some good ol’ fashioned fun. Very, uh,” Lance pauses and muffles the receiver to curse in Spanish. His voice is overly bright when he comes back on. “Very wholesome. Only the most wholesome of fun for the Koganiños.” 

Keith doesn’t feel reassured. But it’s not like he can do anything while he’s here. It’s the tail end of the night, late enough that their only customers are some lonely stragglers and the homeless guy they let sleep at table 22 when it gets too cold out.  Keith only has one last customer he’s waiting on, though, and once he leaves Keith can as well.

He’s making use of his break by huddling against the back wall of the restaurant, smoking. It’s a stupid habit, one he thought he’d broken himself from a few months prior. Lately, though, the pull of smoke into his lungs has been the one moment of relief in his day. He doesn’t allow himself to go through more than two packs in a week, so he lets that alleviate the worst of the guilt.

“Why do I feel like you’re lying right now?” he asks after another drag, and Lance blows a raspberry loud enough that Keith feels the need to wipe spit off his face.

“What do you think I’m doing, torturing them?” A loud squeal sounds from behind him and Lance chuckles nervously. “I’ll admit, that does sound like torture. But it’s definitely not.”

“No, I know what Pidge’s war cry sounds like. She got Matt in a headlock?”

“Yup.”

He sounds a bit awed and Keith doesn’t blame him. Pidge in her element is a sight to behold.

From behind him, the backdoor slams into the wall with a loud thud. Nyma sticks her head out, raising one poorly drawn-on eyebrow at him.

“Hey, we need some drinks made in here. Lotor’s pissed.”

Keith waves her off. Stubbing his cigarette out on the bottom of his boot, he leaves it on the lip of the wall for later. Smoke trails from his nose as he makes his way back inside, phone still pressed to his ear.

“Have they had dinner yet?” he asks Lance, rounding the bar and making his way over to the monitor of drinks he needs to make for the other servers. His customer looks up from his book when he passes by, and Keith covers the receiver to mouth, “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“Uh, not exactly,” Lance says.

“What does ‘not exactly’ mean? It’s already nine.”

“I mean, they’ve had _food_. Just not dinner, really.”

Keith stops mixing a strawberry lemonade to push the phone closer to his ear. “I swear to god, Lance, if I come to pick them up and they’re snorting pixie sticks again like last time---”

“Hey, that was funny and you thought so too.”

“It’s funny until the sugar kicks in and I have to lure my kids down from the top of the fridge.  Listen, I already worry Pidge is going to die with how she eats, can you just feed them something with a little nutritional value?”

Lance sighs. “Fine. I’ll order pizza.”

Not exactly what he was going for with nutritional value, but at least the kids will have something in their stomachs.

Lotor chooses that moment to walk up beside Keith on the other side of the bar and frown disdainfully at his phone. He’s only serving, not shift leading, so Keith’s not really afraid of him.

“Keith,” Lotor says, posh accent still intact. “You know company policy doesn’t allow cellular devices up front where customers can see---”

Keith wiggles his phone by his face. “Manager Lance said it was okay.”

Lance laughs in his ear. “Oh is that Lotor? Tell him Manager Lance also fired him.”

Lotor’s face twists in disgust. “Lance is not a _manager_.”

Keith shrugs. “Well neither are you.” He turns around and starts making his drinks at the other counter so he doesn’t have to look at Lotor’s face. Another crash sounds from Lance’s side of the phone and Keith narrows his eyes, hands a little aggressive as he cuts an orange slice for garnish.

“Okay, I wanna talk to them,” he says.

Lance whines, “Come on, Keith. You’re being overbearing. They’re playing right now.”

“They can stop for a couple minutes.”

“What do you even want?”

“To make sure they’re not killing each other.”

“Well, they’re not.”

“That’s really not reassuring.”

Lance huffs out a sigh, creating static across the line. “Fine, but you’re going to give them complexes or something.” His voice gets farther from the phone. “Pidge, Matt. Keith wants to talk to you!”

“You’re on speaker phone,” he says after a moment.

“Hi Keith!”

“Keith!”

Keith instantly feels a little of the tension drain from his shoulders at the sound of their voices. He smiles into the receiver.

“Hi guys. Have you been having fun?”

“Yeah!” Matt enthuses. “We’ve been doing experiments with Lance. He found all kinds of cool ones on his phone. It’s all over the ceiling!”

“What’s on the ceiling?”

“I don’t know, all kinds of stuff!”

His words come fast after each other, and Keith starts planning Lance’s murder now.

“Sounds great, buddy. How much Mountain Dew have you had tonight?”

“ _So much_.”

Lance laughs nervously in the background. “Okay, time to get off the phone now.”

“Nuh-uh,” Keith interrupts before he can escape. “I haven’t talked to Pidge yet.”

“I’m right here, Keith! I did the experiments too.”

“I know you did. What else have you guys done?”

She hums, and Keith can almost see her fiddling with the loose tooth that’s been bugging her for weeks. “We watched Star Wars.”

“That’s a good one.” Keith finally finishes up his last drink and passes it over to Lotor. Lotor makes an angry gesture at his phone and Keith waves him off. “Did you and Matt do all the Wookiee calls?”

Lance cuts in again. “Yup, they did. Real great. Super fun time we had. Doing the Wookiee calls.”

Suspicion flares in Keith’s gut. “Lance,” he presses.

“Keith,” Pidge says, sounding perplexed. “How come you never let us watch the ones with Anakin before? They were really good!”

Keith’s mouth drops open in shock. “Lance, the _prequels_?”

His face twists in horror as Lance sputters on the other end of the line. Now he not only has to murder Lance, but his kids as well. No one survives that kind of trauma intact. He accidently meets eyes with his customer at the bar and blushes when he realizes the man is laughing into his palm. Keith smiles back embarrassedly, hand coming up to tuck some hair behind his ear and partially cover his face. He turns away.

“I can’t believe you,” he hisses into the phone, hoping his voice is low enough not to carry. “It’s not enough for you to have shit taste, you have to corrupt my kids too?”

“It’s not fair that you weren’t completing their education, Keith! Let them decide what they like on their own!”

“You can’t un-see something like Jar Jar Binks, Lance. I was _protecting_ them.”

Lance must have kicked the kids off the line, because he can hear them shouting again in the background.

“Um, hold that thought, Keith,” Lance says. “Actually, gotta go. Great talking to you, man.”

“Wait, we aren’t done here---”

“Bye!”

Keith makes a frustrated noise as his phone goes dead. He slumps against the bar. At least he knows his kids aren’t dead now. Just ruined for life.

He sighs and the man at the bar laughs.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” he says, smile wide where he’s hiding it behind a hand.

Keith shrugs, coming over to stand a little closer to where he’s sitting. “It’s not like you had a choice. Sorry you had to listen to all of that.”

The man shakes his head. “I get it. New babysitter?”

“No, I’m actually in between babysitters,” Keith sighs. “It’s why I had to have my idiot friend watch them for the night. I knew I’d have to worry about the sugar and the caffeine. Whiney sith lords weren’t even on my radar.”

The man’s eyes crinkle when he laughs. It should make him look older, especially with his white bangs, but somehow doesn’t. Keith lets his hands fall to the counter as he leans in a bit.

“Well, it’s understandable,” the man says sensibly. “No one thinks to look out for that. I didn’t know people actually liked the prequels.”

Keith nods. “Right? I’m embarrassed to be friends with him right now.”

The man laughs again and Keith smiles. He can’t deny that the guy is attractive, kind eyes behind his thin-framed glasses. He fills out his shirt in all the right places, too. Keith’s eyes follow along the width of his shoulder, but he pauses at---Oh. He flicks his gaze away before he gets caught staring at the metal of the man’s prosthetic.

The man continues like he hasn’t noticed Keith’s wandering eyes.

“Well, don’t worry. Your kids will recover,” he says, mirth in his eyes. “Trust me. I have two of my own.”

“Yeah? How old?”

“Six and nine.”

Keith fights not to have a visible reaction to that. Having a nine year old puts the man at a much higher age than he’d earlier guessed. He’d rationalized the white part of his hair away as hereditary or an aesthetic choice, but now he’s almost starting to rethink that. His skin is smooth and unlined, though, save for a single imperfection cut across the bridge of his nose.

The man must notice Keith’s confusion because he smiles ruefully.

“We adopted my oldest when she was four,” he says in a way that makes it clear he’s had to explain this many times before.

Not too old then. Keith was probably right with his initial estimate of late 20’s. Keith leans in closer and grins.

“So you weren’t a teen mom then?” he asks.

“No,” the man laughs. “Not a teen mom. And you?”

“Was I a teen mom?”

Another laugh. “ _No_. No, how old are your kids?” 

“Katie is five and Matt is six. Here, I have a picture.”

He rummages around in his apron to pull out his phone. It takes him a couple moments, but only because he has to veto nearly every picture in his camera roll.

“Sorry, I have to find one where they don’t look like heathens. I mean, they are, but it’s embarrassing when people see.”

He settles on one from their first day of school. They’re standing in their kitchen, backpacks on and smiles wide in excitement. The picture of aliens incinerating Earth that Matt drew is clear behind them on the fridge, but neither is making a face or has questionable substances on their shirts, so he deems it presentable.

The man’s eyes soften as he gazes down at the picture.

“They don’t look like heathens at all,” the man says, looking back up at Keith with a smile. “Though now I’m starting to question whether _you_ were the teen mom.”

Keith grins, shaking his head as he puts his phone away. “Nah, they’re my sister’s kids. I’m their legal guardian.”

He congratulates himself on not tripping over the words. It’s only taken six months.

“You’re wrong about the heathen part, though,” he continues, sliding his elbows on the counter and leaning on them. “You haven’t seen them hyped up on Mountain Dew and pixie sticks.”

“When you have to lure them down from the top of the refrigerator?”

Keith turns his face into one hand. “I forgot you heard that. _Yes_ , that actually happened once. I’ll never forgive Lance for that one.”

“I get it,” the man says. “I have to bribe my kids with dessert every time I want them to eat their carrots.”  

Keith snorts. “At least your kids know what fruits and vegetables are. Katie only just realized last week that cherry wasn’t just a flavor of popsicle.”

“Oh no, a picky eater?”

“The worst,” he answers. “If chicken nuggets and mac and cheese didn’t exist, I’m pretty sure she would just starve.”

The man laughs. He seems to do that a lot. If Keith wasn’t preening so hard at drawing them all out, he’d be lost in it a little.

“Well,” the man says, “she’s got the main food groups down. What even is there other than protein and carbs?”

“You say that, but she’s probably going to end up with scurvy someday. You can’t eat chicken nuggets with no teeth.”

Another laugh and Keith’s whole body goes warm. He hopes it’s not showing in his face. He’s never been an easy blusher, but he feels a tell-tale heat across his cheeks. Pressing a cool hand against the side of his face, he smiles down at the counter. He feels a little off-balance, but in a good way. It’s kind of like when he’s had a few drinks too many on nights in with Lance and Hunk, like he’s laughing too loud and smiling too big but he doesn’t have to worry about anyone judging him for it.

When he looks back up, the man is still grinning. Their gazes catch and Keith realizes that this is the part where he’s supposed to ask if the guy wants dessert, print his receipt, and get him on his way. Rather than do that, he asks, “So, that any good?”

The man follows Keith’s gaze down to his book.

“Oh, one of my favorites, actually,” he says, flipping it over to reveal a close-up shot of a ringed planet with a smattering of interstellar star ships in the distance. “I’m in between novels, so I’m re-reading a bit.”

“You a fan of Sci-Fi?”

“Yeah, embarrassingly enough.”

“What’s embarrassing about it? You’re not a Trekkie, are you?” The man ducks to hide his face and Keith chokes on a surprised laugh. “Oh no, you _are_. Oh my god, this whole time we’ve been talking and I didn’t even _know_.”

“I know, I know. It’s bad.”

“You can’t even tell by looking at you. You seem so _normal_.”

“I’m sorry, I should have warned you.”

Keith can’t stop grinning. It’s almost embarrassing at this point. He’d feel weirder about it, but the man seems to be in the same position, cheeks a bit rosy and eyes shining.

Keith decides to take mercy on him. “I’m just messing with you, our family is super into space too. I’m more of a Star Wars guy, excluding the prequels of course.”

“Of course.”

“But Matt likes the newer Star Trek movies, so you’re fine.”

The man laughs, leaning an elbow on the bar. “Good, I was starting to think I could never show my face here again.” His head drops to rest on an open palm, and he nods at Keith. “Do you like to read then?”

“Yeah.” Keith pauses. “Well, I mean, I did. Haven’t really had time for a while now.”

He can’t even remember the last time he’d taken the time to sit down with a book. It’s been months, years maybe. Even before having the kids full time, he’d been a college student. Between classes and the spur-of-the-moment misadventures Lance had dragged Keith and Hunk into, he just hadn’t had the time.

He shrugs. “You know. Kids.”

The man nods like he understands, but it’s with a downturned mouth. “Yeah, I do know. It gets hectic.” He tilts his book on its side and taps it against the counter. “I’ve learned I’ve got to sometimes take time for myself, though, or else I’d go crazy.”

“Well, you’re not wrong,” Keith says, hand coming up to rake some of his hair behind an ear. He laughs a little, self-consciously. Under those eyes, it’s too easy to remember how much of a disaster he’s been lately. He doesn’t have enough time to even be a good parent, let alone find any time for himself.    

Behind him, Lotor clears his throat. When Keith turns around, he frowns down his nose at the both of them. He flicks his head towards the kitchen and raises his brows. Keith knows this means he’s supposed to be breaking down his equipment and sending it back to their dishwasher in the kitchen. It also means he’s supposed to be encouraging the man to leave so they can close down.

He makes sure to roll his eyes at Lotor, just because he’s been an asshole lately, and turns a rueful smile back on the man. He’s a little surprised how reluctant he feels to end this conversation. He doesn’t generally connect with his bar-guests, with people at all really. It’s a bit unnerving to not want this one to leave.

“That’s, uh, my cue to get my shit together,” he says.

The man nods. “Of course. I’ve been distracting you.”

“Nah, you haven’t. That guy over there is just a total dickwad.”

The man gives a weak smile and shifts to pull his wallet out of his back pocket.

“How much do I owe you?” he asks, shuffling through his cards.

Keith shakes his head. “It’s on the house.”

He hadn’t bothered to put the guy’s drinks or measly trip to the salad bar into the computer yet, so it’s an easy fix to just “forget.” This place owes him anyway. If not money, then degrees of sanity.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly---”

Keith waves him off. “Nah, the good conversation more than makes up for it. You saved my entire night, really.”

Frown pulling at his face, the man considers him. “There must be something I can do for you…” His eyes suddenly light up and he leans forward. “You said you were in between babysitters, right? I have one my girls go to. They don’t go much, but he’s like an uncle to them.”

Keith blinks owlishly at him. “Oh, really? That would, that would be awesome.” He shakes his head, remembering his holdups before. “Do you have an estimate on how much, though? Everyone I’ve gotten interested in always ends up charging an arm and a leg.”

“Well, mine only charges an arm, is that okay?”

It takes him a moment, but then Keith’s snorting out a laugh and trying to cover it with his hand. “Oh my god. I feel like I shouldn’t be laughing at that.”

“No, you were definitely supposed to laugh.” The man’s smile is wide, not even a hint of self-consciousness as he uses his prosthetic hand to write out the babysitter’s phone number on a napkin. “I think you’ll be okay, though. I’m sure he would be willing to work with you on price. Especially if you mention you’re a friend of mine.”

“A friend of who, exactly?” Keith hedges as he takes the napkin, feeling brave for a moment.

Something pulls low in his belly when the man meets his eyes and says, “I go by Shiro.”

“Shiro,” Keith tries out, and the man---Shiro---smiles. “I’m Keith.”

“Keith,” Shiro parrots. “It was very nice to meet you.”

Their gazes catch and hold again, and they smile at each other. Shiro has such a nice smile, wide and sweet and genuine. Keith can’t really remember ever seeing someone smile this much before. He likes it.

“ _Keith_.”

Lotor is behind him again, but Keith doesn’t bother to turn around.

“I really do have to get shit done. Feel free to stick around as long as you like, though.” He flips a thumb over his shoulder at Lotor. “The longer you stay, the more it pisses him off, so.”

Shiro grins. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Keith takes a couple steps back, shuffling a bit on his feet. “I’ll, uh, see you around then?”

“Yeah, definitely. Goodnight Keith.”

“Night Shiro.”

Keith forces himself to do his closing work in the kitchen. Even as he does inventory and rolls silverware and wipes down equipment, his mind ticks over the past half hour, replays it over and over. He feels warm all through his body, and Hunk stops him several times to ask him why he’s smiling down at his napkins.

When he finally ventures back to the bar, Shiro is gone. His book is still on the counter, though, and Keith’s stomach drops when he realizes he’s forgotten it. He picks it up, hoping Shiro might still be nearby, when he notices a ten dollar bill and another napkin note next to the book.

The handwriting is straight and neat, written in a steady hand.

 _Keith,_ it says.

_I know how hard it is to catch time for yourself when you have kids. If you find any, I hope this helps. It’s no Star Wars (excluding the prequels, of course), but it does the trick._

The _Shiro_ at the bottom is signed with a flourish.

Keith looks back down at the obviously well-loved book, spine thread-bare and cracked from countless readings. His smile feels stupidly big, and he has to cover it with one of his hands lest one of his coworkers see it.

“Keith, I _say_ ,” Lotor says from behind the counter. “Would you get a move on?”

 Keith gingerly places the book in his bag, careful to keep its pages from creasing. He sneaks one more glance at Shiro’s note, letters neatly penned across the napkin, before tucking it away too. He starts the rest of his work breaking down the bar, cheeks aching a bit under the strength of his smile.

***

Later, kids tucked into his bed and Kosmo settled down after his evening walk, Keith climbs out onto the rickety fire-escape outside his window. He folds his knees into the over-sized hoodie he’s wearing and curls up where he can lean his head back and study the sky. On clear nights he can sometimes find a constellation or two, but tonight it’s just him and the bright swell of the moon overhead.

He pulls Shiro’s book out of his hoodie pocket and takes a moment to trace his hand over the slight bump of the title. It’s campy, like something that would be sold on a gas station dollar rack. The tagline _Victory or Death_ almost makes him snort.

The note is tucked inside the front cover. He reads it again and Shiro’s words fan at something warm kindling in his chest. He doesn’t think about bills or babysitters or work or Facebook.

He opens to the first page and begins to read.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Feedback always cherished:)


	3. Chapter 3

Keith is on his lunch break at his day job at the garage when he gets a call from his kids’ school.

He expects it to just be another “your kids did something weird and we are legally required to tell you about it” call, which is why the panic hits him twice as hard when he is proven otherwise.

“What do you mean Matt’s sick? Sick with what? Are you sure he didn’t just pull the chocolate milk and hot dog puke stunt again?”

He looks at his watch and feels sick himself when he sees that it is only twelve-thirty. His shift here doesn’t end for another two hours and his one at the restaurant starts a half hour after that. He can’t possibly afford to take off work, and yet…

“I’ll be there in a bit, just,” he worries his lip between his teeth, “gimme a minute.”

It hurts his pride asking his boss to leave early, but the thought of Matt sick at school, the nurses unfamiliar with the anxiety he gets when something goes wrong, makes him push all else aside. 

On the metro ride to their school, he messages just about every server he works with, begging them to take his shift tonight. When that doesn’t work, he throws what’s left of his pride out the door and calls Lance.

“Don’t worry about it, buddy. I’ll always have your back. What time does your shift start?”

Thank the universe for Lance.

Distractions aside, Keith’s worried sick. All he’s heard is that Matt threw up at recess and is running a fever, the sure signs of the flu. He has to keep reminding himself that kids get sick all the time and that the world isn’t cruel enough to make an exception out of his family. Except isn’t it? The kids, for one, don’t have health insurance, and then there’s the fact that Keith barely pays the bills as it is. Taking off work, even for just a day or two, will kill his bank account, and Matt and Pidge always pick up on his stress so easily…

He’s so lost in thought that he almost misses his stop and has to make a show of pushing past the mass of bodies to reach the exit. He just barely slips out the doors before they close shut behind him and the train rushes off to its next location, leaving Keith in a crowd of people unaware of his current state of distress. Taking a deep breath to gather his senses, he begins the short walk from the metro station to the kids’ school, ignoring the cold bite of the wind on his bare arms. 

Under normal circumstances, Keith would be grateful for the tight security the school is kept under; too many whack jobs roamed the streets in the area. Yet as he stands outside the doors, waiting to be buzzed in, he has to force his hands into his pockets to stop himself from banging his fists on the glass. He can literally  _ see _ the old man at the front desk talking to the school guidance counselor about something that makes them both throw their heads back in laughter. Keith takes a deep breath—he can usually hide his temper pretty well, but he’s already established these aren’t normal circumstances. He finds himself repeatedly jamming his finger into the doorbell, hearing it buzz over and over and over again until the door finally unlocks with a click.

He’s delayed even further when the old man at the front desk looks at him with a furrowed brow and says, “Oh, I should’ve guessed it was you making such a ruckus out there. The ol’ Kogane charm, huh? It must be in your blood.”

Keith is in no mood to entertain the old bastard who always yells at his kids too much and steals money from students’ lunch accounts. “Please, Mr. Barnes. I just need to pick up my kid.”

Mr. Barnes types something into his computer for a moment, then looks up. “Nothing here says that either of your kids had to fill out a Think Sheet or visit the principal’s office this week. For once they seem to be on good behavior.”

He highly doubts that, but takes the backhanded compliment anyway if only to make this interaction as short as possible. He swallows thickly and explains, “Matt is sick. I need to take him home.” A moment’s pause, and then, “Katie, too.”

“This is the first I’ve heard about Matt,” Mr. Barnes says. “Let me check with Nurse Valentine.”

“She  _ just _ called me, man,” Keith says, but Mr. Barnes is already dialing the nurse’s office extension with wrinkled hands.

He makes use of the downtime to text his new babysitter that he won’t be sending the kids home with him today.

Coran Hieronymus Wimbleton Smythe. A name like that is a telltale sign of, well, someone  _ not _ to send your kids home with. Yet a thorough google search showed that he is highly rated in the area, and if  _ Shiro _ trusted him, then Keith does too. Though  _ why _ , he isn’t sure. He’s putting more faith than he’d like to admit in the judgement of someone he met once and hardly knows, but as it turns out Coran is actually a great babysitter, so there.

In fact, Coran is almost too good to be true. A little strange, yes, and definitely in possession of a few quirks that haven’t escaped even Keith’s weird kids’ notices, but overall he’s incredibly kind-hearted and a great match for Matt and Pidge. The two talk nonstop about him and have developed a hyperfixation on the origins of his mustache, conjuring up more stories about it than Keith can keep track of (and both agreeing that it’s likely been there all along, that Coran was born with a bushy upper lip). The only downside Keith had found when he first contacted him were his rates. Coran is well beyond Keith’s range of affordability, but after explaining his situation (and guiltlessly throwing in that he knew Shiro), Coran had readily agreed to a reduced price. He really is a perfect match to their family, and Keith swears if he ever sees Shiro again he’ll kiss the very ground he walks on.

Mr. Barnes hangs up the phone just as Keith receives a text back from Coran wishing Matt well. 

“Nurse Valentine says he really is sick this time,” he says.

Keith tries not to noticeably sigh. “Yes, I know this. Can I pick him up now?”

Mr. Barnes grumbles one thing or another about the youth disrespecting their elders and sets a slow pace to the nurse’s office that Keith follows. He mistakenly steps on the heels of the man’s loafers twice and has to bounce on his feet to keep from lashing out when Mr. Barnes takes several painstaking seconds to slip back into them. By the time they reach the nurse’s office, Keith has lost all patience and wonders how he’s made it thus far without physically harming another human being. He pushes past Mr. Barnes and opens the door to the nurse’s office, simultaneously relieved and concerned upon seeing Matt.

He looks bad. Nose red, eyes puffy, skin void of its usual flush. He’s slumped into his seat as if he can barely hold himself up, and the small, “Keith,” he mumbles when he sees him breaks his heart. He tumbles into Keith’s chest, arms reaching up, and Keith hoists him up onto his hip even though he’s getting too big to be carried. He also sneezes into his neck in greeting, but Keith decides he can excuse it for once. He throws Matt’s backpack over his other shoulder and takes to running a soothing hand over the boy’s back while Nurse Valentine goes over his vitals.

“He’s running a high fever and has a bit of a tummy ache,” she says, handing him a printout of the information that he glances out before shoving in his pocket. “Says his throat hurts too. Just keep an eye out if he doesn’t get better in the next twenty-four hours and make sure to give him lots of liquids. He should be as good as new if you hop on it now.”

Keith nods, but feels unease sitting deep in his gut anyway. It is probably just the flu. Matt has gotten the flu before; this school is practically a breeding ground for bugs and germs, and Matt is known to put questionable substances in his mouth with no qualms. Keith probably has some kids Tylenol to treat the symptoms in his medicine cabinet. It really is no big deal. And yet, a small part of Keith that’s still hurting so bad can’t help but think that he’d had these very same thoughts about Acxa only a couple months ago.  _ It’s just a cold. It’s treatable _ … It leaves him more worried than he should be and he hardly notices that he’s walked all the way back to the front desk where Pidge stands, winter hat pulled over her bangs and waiting.

“We get to leave early?” she says after they’ve checked out, tucking her gloved hand into his. “Can we go to Chuck E. Cheese’s?”

“Not today, Pidge,” Keith says, shivering as the wind hits his bare arms. It’s only now that things have calmed down and Matt is tucked securely into his side that he remembers he left his jacket at the garage. The few blocks it takes to get to the metro station feel a whole lot longer without the adrenaline pumping through his veins and keeping him warm. “We need to take Matt home. He’s sick.”

She throws her head back and groans. “Why does he have to be sick the  _ one  _ time we get to leave school early?”

Chuckling, Keith says, “You get to leave school  _ because  _ he’s sick. You really should be thanking him.”

She groans again, but is otherwise quiet for the rest of the walk. Matt, on the other hand, can’t seem to stop sniffing. His face is pressed into Keith’s neck and his hand tangled in Keith’s hair, a habit he developed as a baby. Keith’s heart tugs at the labored sound of his breath, not able to bring himself to be angry when he coughs right into his face. He tries to remember the home remedies Acxa used to throw together when he had a sore throat and feels an ache in his heart when he can’t remember any for the life of him.

Keith lets both the kids relax the rest of the day. He figures he should make Pidge finish up her schoolwork when they get home, but they haven’t had a chance to all three hang out in a while. Even if Matt is sick, it’s still nice to all be together for several uninterrupted hours. Pidge pulls out her eerily large collection of plastic gorillas and lines them up in orderly gorilla formations, the calm before the storm, before declaring guerilla warfare and throwing them every which way. He pretends he doesn’t notice one hit the wall and leave a sizeable dent in its stead. He’s just renting, after all. Matt, on the other hand, is Pidge’s polar opposite. He barely lets go of Keith long enough for him to swap his coat and jeans for his pajamas. As soon as he’s changed he’s back to clinging onto Keith, hardly watching the cartoons that Keith turns on for him.

Keith tries not to think about how he’s going to pay for a potential doctor’s visit, or what the kids are going to have for dinner since Coran won’t be feeding them, or the bills piling up on the coffee table in front of him. He tries to just watch cartoons with Matt, and when one distraction isn’t enough, he pulls out his phone.

That works for all of two minutes, but as soon as he pulls up Facebook he’s reminded of the messages he received a few weeks prior from the woman claiming to be his mother.

There’s no way it’s his actual mother. He wouldn’t even have thought twice about deleting the message if it hadn’t been for the mention of Acxa. It  _ can’t _ be his real mother, but even if it is, so what? Is he supposed to forget twenty-two long, harsh years of abandonment over a stupid Facebook message? Sure, and while he’s at it he might as well forgive Lance for twerking in his favorite pair of black jeans and ripping them right down the ass just to impress some stupid girl.

Yet all he keeps thinking about every time his thumb hovers over the _delete_ button is that one line: _I was in contact with your sister Acxa some months ago, but she has since stopped her messages._ She had been talking to _his sister_ , all without him knowing. Acxa wouldn’t have talked to just any random woman. There had to have been a reason she chose this one.

Yeah, this is not quite the distraction Keith had in mind. He tosses his phone (along with all thoughts of his mother) on the other side of the couch and settles for alternating between watching reruns of Spongebob, dodging wayward gorillas, and feeding Matt spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup.

When they all begin to nod off in a pile on the couch, Keith forces himself to get up before they’re out for the rest of the night. He starts to carry Matt to his and Pidge’s room, but Matt shakes his head and points to Keith’s room instead. He figures he’ll wind up there anyway, so he obliges Matt and tucks him into his side on the mattress. Not five minutes later and Pidge and Kosmo are laying on top of him too, and he falls asleep rotating between running his finger threw all of their hair, satisfied by the low hums of their breathing.

***

In the morning, Matt’s fever is half a degree higher and Keith doesn’t send him to school with Pidge. His situation doesn’t improve the next day, and by day three, Keith is left with no other choice than to make a doctor’s appointment.

He doesn’t ask how much it’ll cost without insurance when he makes the call to the doctor’s office, already anticipating writing a check that’ll bounce and add fees to his pitiful bank account. Having missed so many days of work already, he’s not sure how he is going to make ends meet this month. One look at Matt, however, convinces Keith that it all doesn’t matter; his kids come first, even if that means he doesn’t eat for the next week.

Keith and Matt find themselves tucked into a corner of the waiting room at the nearest health clinic, avoiding the nasty hodgepodge of disease-ridden patients around them. Keith shoots the girl sitting next to them a look when she coughs in their direction and douses Matt’s hands and arms in hand sanitizer every couple of minutes. It’s not that he’s a hypochondriac, but Keith isn’t about to prolong Matt’s sickness just because some teenager never learned to cover her mouth when coughing.

Because this is one of the only somewhat affordable clinics in the area, the place is crowded, and Keith is told it’ll be a twenty minute wait at the very least. For once Matt doesn’t whine in boredom while having nothing to do, furthering Keith’s theory that he really  _ does _ need to be at the clinic.

“Keith?” Matt asks, shifting next to Keith and reaching for his hand. He rubs a thumb over the scar on Keith’s wrist, a weird fascination of his ever since Keith got it a couple years back.

“Yeah, buddy?”

Matt scoots closer until he’s pressed entirely to Keith’s side. “It smells weird in here. Like farts, except way worse.”

Keith snorts. “It smells like a health clinic full of sick people.”

“I’m very sick right now?” Matt asks, sunken brown eyes meeting his in question.

“Nah, just a little sick.”

Matt pauses to consider it, brow crinkling below his glasses, before saying, “I’m not going to die like Mom, am I?”

Keith sighs. “No, Mattie, you just have a cold. People don’t die from colds.”

“They said that about Mom too.”

This time, Keith has to swallow past the lump in his throat and pretends this very thought didn't pass through his mind late last night while he laid wide awake in the dark of his bedroom. “Yes, but that was different. You’re young and healthy and have a good immune system. It’s why I make you eat your one vegetable a day, so your body can kick bad germ ass.”

Matt blinks up at him owlishly but doesn’t speak for a long moment. Eventually, he turns away and grabs Keith’s hand again, picking at the skin around his thumb. Keith bats his hand away when he pulls at a piece of loose skin, and Matt fights back for a moment, but then blurts out, “Can I say a bad word since I’m sick?”

It’s so unexpected that it startles a laugh out of Keith, but he’s glad for the distraction. “Sure, but only one. Choose wisely.”

“Pussy,” Matt says, not even pausing to think about it. Keith can tell he’s been waiting to say that one for a while. A woman a few seats over glares their way, and Keith can’t say he blames her.

“Where the hell did you learn that?” he says after returning the glare the woman’s way. Matt may’ve pushed his luck, but like hell Keith is going to let some Kris Jenner-looking motherfucker shame his parenting skills.

Matt shrugs. “Lance says it.”

_ Fucking Lance. _ “Well don’t say that one ever again.”

“Do I get a redo?”

“Nope. I told you to choose widely, didn’t I?”

Matt sighs, but otherwise doesn’t protest. Keith makes a mental note to murder Lance the next time he sees him. They wait in silence as several minutes pass by, Keith resting his chin on the top of Matt’s head while Matt plays a game on his phone. Eventually Matt’s name is called out and they are lead down a hall and into a small, sterile room. Keith has to peel Matt away from him so a nurse can measure his height and weight, and he answers a few questions about Matt’s medical history the best he can. Finally, a knock on their door signals the end to their wait and their nurse practitioner walks in.

Keith’s breath catches. Normally he would say he’s fairly good at masking his emotions when it counts, but he doesn’t think  _ anybody  _ would have been able to hide their shock in his situation.

It’s Shiro, the man he met at work a few weeks prior. He’s swapped his street clothes for a pair of black scrubs, and he isn’t wearing his glasses, but he’s just as attractive as Keith remembered—and Keith definitely  _ has _ thought of him quite a bit since that night he served him. Keith feels blood rush up his neck in recognition, and lays a hand over the worst of it to cover it..

Shiro seems to recognize him too, his smile turning from professional to friendly as his eyes light up in recognition. 

“Oh, hey! Keith, right?” he says, followed by a bashful, “I mean, the clipboard says your name too, but we  _ have _ met before. You served me a few weeks ago?”

Keith smiles too, a little crookedly. He knows he must look goofy, but he honestly never expected to see Shiro again and he’s nervous. “That would, uh, be me. I got your book.” He cringes a bit, feeling stupidly awkward. “I mean, the one you left me? I’ve been, um, reading it…” 

Stupid. What else would he be doing with it? This is why he shouldn’t be allowed to socialize.

Shiro’s smile widens. “I was going to ask if you got it. I didn’t expect to get to ask so soon, though.”

“Uh yeah, me neither.” 

“But I’m glad for it,” Shiro continues as if Keith isn’t the most awkward conversationalist in the world. “I’ve wanted to see you at the restaurant again but these last few weeks have been so busy at work. It is cold season, after all.” He winks at Keith, who feels his face heat up even more.

Okay, so he  _ has _ thought of Keith since their last interaction. Probably not as much as Keith has thought of him, but it’s quality development from ten seconds ago when Keith thought he was going to have to explain that he wasn’t creepily stalking him. Heis flattered by the thought, and his smile returns, a little more shy this time.

“Yeah, I have firsthand knowledge of that.” He bounces Matt on his knee, who grumbles and wraps himself around Keith to stop the movement. “This little goblin is my kid, Matt.”

“Matt, as in the one who likes Star Trek?”

Matt tears his face from Keith’s neck to glare blearily up at Shiro. 

“What’s it to you, pussy—” he says and Keith slams a hand over his mouth before he can finish.

“Sorry, he’s delirious, has no idea what he’s saying.” Keith breaks off in an awkward laugh. “But, uh, yeah. This is him. He’s, uh, sick?”

He cringes. He should’ve just let Matt die at home—at least then they’d both still have their dignity.

Shiro has the courtesy to just laugh and move on. “I can see that. What’s been going on?”

“He’s been throwing up and has a pretty high fever and I’m just worried because it’s been a couple days and he hasn’t gotten better.”

“Well it’s a good thing you’re here then, huh, Matt? You wanna hop up on the table so I can take a look at you?” Shiro tries to make eye contact with Matt, who buries his face in Keith’s shoulder.

“Can you sit up there so Shiro can make you feel better, Matt?” The boy shakes his head against Keith’s jacket, and Keith shoots Shiro a bashful smile. “Sorry, he gets a little clingy when he’s sick.”

Shiro waves him off. “Oh, I’ve seen far worse. I had someone once who hissed at me every time I tried to touch him.”

Keith laughs. “Kids are great.”

“Oh, no, this was a grown man in his forties.”

Keith makes an embarrassing choking noise. Even Matt looks up at him curiously as his choking morphs into laughter. “That’s even better, oh my god.” He clears his throat. “Well, I promise Matt’s not going to scratch. Though he also doesn’t seem to want to move from my lap.”

Shiro finally catches Matt’s eye and says, “What if Keith sits up there with you? How does that sound?”

Eventually, Matt agrees, and so Keith moves to sit on the examination table, feeling a little silly when his legs dangle from the ledge. Shiro has Matt take off his glasses as he shines a light in his eyes, then performs various doctorly tasks that Keith is paying zero attention to whatsoever, because he is leaning in  _ very  _ closely. Keith tries to hold his breath but smells the light scent of cologne anyway and somehow feels like a pervert, which is ridiculous because Shiro sprays the stuff on for a reason and it is  _ not _ Keith’s fault that his nostrils choose to be hyper-aware of it. His stomach feels tight when Shiro’s gaze meets his for a brief second, so he brings his eyes down to his body, a solid mass of muscle. He definitely works out a lot (either that or he’s a frequent user of steroids, which seems highly unlikely because Keith’s already pegged him as a hard worker). He watches as Shiro scribbles something down on his clipboard, favoring his right hand despite the prosthetic, and Keith wonders if he’s had the prosthetic for a long time or is just really good at adaption. He has to look away fast when Shiro catches him staring yet again, but he doesn’t miss the small smile Shiro gives him.

“Alright, Matt,” Shiro says after setting down his clipboard, grabbing a cotton swab from behind him. “I’m going to need to swipe a sample of the ick in your throat so I can see how we can make you better. It’ll only take a second, okay?”

Matt mumbles something only Keith can hear, and he snorts, repeating it to Shiro. “He wants to make sure you’re not going to send the sample off to the government.”

Keith is blessed with a hearty laugh. “No, this sample is top secret. I’m just going to feed it to a machine and it’ll tell us what’s wrong.”

For the first time in days, Matt’s interest is piqued. He cracks open one eye and peers at Shiro. “A robot?”

Shiro’s eyes dart to Keith, who gives a minute nod. “Yeah, a robot who knows all about sickness. Is that okay?”

“As long as it’s not a government robot,” he says, and allows Shiro to get a sample.

“Alright,” Shiro says after he returns from running the test, a few new sheets of paper in his hands. He sits in his chair and smiles at Keith. “Luckily, it looks like it’s only strep throat. We’ll get him a prescription for it and he’ll be good as new.”

Keith nods, but feels no relief. Medication just means more money.  _ At least it’s treatable _ , he tells himself.  _ At least Matt’ll get better _ .

“Of course, if the symptoms continue, call in or come see me. Other than that, you should be free to go.”

Keith stands with Matt in his arms, unsure with what to do next. It’s not like he can stick around and talk—unlike Keith’s job, Shiro’s runs on a schedule and doesn’t leave much room for conversation with someone as unimportant as Keith. For the first time since arriving, he feels self-conscious under Shiro’s gaze, realizing he’s dressed like a hobo and his hair’s pushed back in a baseball cap, exposing the scar on his cheek more fully than last time. Matt’s hair is a rat’s nest and he’s wearing a pair of jeans a size too big for him, and Shiro must think he’s a mess.

Yet Shiro’s smile shows no judgement whatsoever. It’s soft and crinkles his eyes and makes Keith forget his own embarrassment for a moment.

“Thanks for everything, Dr. Shiro. I was getting pretty fond of this one, so I’m glad he doesn’t have some kind of incurable disease,” Keith says, feeling triumphant when he’s awarded with the man’s golden laugh. “And thanks for the babysitter rec. The kids love Coran already. Oh, and the book. That’s, um, thanks.”

“Of course, Keith.” Shiro’s smile is warm. “I hope you’re liking it?”

“I am, though I’ll admit I’m only like halfway through with it. Turns out raising two kids takes up quite a bit of time, or something.”

“I can attest to that,” Shiro agrees. “When you  _ do  _ finish we should definitely meet up to talk about it. You’re the first person I’ve been able to convince to read it.”

It feels like he’s asking for a date, and if Keith was a love interest in some 1950s romance film, he’d probably swoon right now. It’s one thing to say,  _ good to see you again _ , but for Shiro to  _ ask  _ to see him again? God is real, and he’s standing two feet away from Keith right now. 

Matt chooses then to sneeze—of course—directly onto the collar of Keith’s shirt, and Keith is pulled back into reality, fast. As much as he’d love to get to know Shiro more, he really  _ doesn’t _ have any extra time in his schedule. After taking off so many days of work, he’ll have to pick up twice as many shifts to make up the money he’s lost. Between that and taking care of Matt and Pidge, he barely has time to take care of himself, let alone meet up with a friend. It’s something that he finds himself explaining to Lance and Hunk more often than he’d like, but it’s not like he’s actively pushing people away. He just can’t justify sacrificing time with his kids in order to hang out with old college buddies, or go out for drinks, or discuss book endings with a cute guy he barely knows.

“I really want to, but I don’t think I can. I’m pretty busy right now with work and this punk and his sister”

Keith hates that it sounds like a rejection, and he hates even more the way Shiro’s eyes briefly flash with disappointment. But he’s quick to recover, and his smile is persistent. “Well when are you working again? I could always come in and talk to you then, if you want some company. If anything, we can do it just to piss off your coworker. Sorry,” he adds, eyes flicking down to Matt.

“Nah, he’s heard a lot worse,” Keith says, thinking of Matt’s little outburst earlier. 

It’s a little strange, how forward Shiro is being about wanting to hang out with Keith. He can’t say he’s ever experienced that before. Normally the moment he opens his mouth is when people decide that Keith isn’t worth their time, with Lance and Hunk being the only two exceptions he can recall. He doesn’t think this in a self-deprecating way; he’s not great with people anyway, so really it saves everyone a whole lot of awkwardness. Shiro’s persistence is unusual, but for some reason it’s not as off-putting as Keith feels it should be. With anybody else, Keith would say no—he’s already brushed him off once, after all. But Keith would be lying if he said he doesn’t feel his and Shiro’s chemistry, not to mention Shiro’s both pretty goddamn hot  _ and  _ a fucking  _ nurse _ .

“But um, yeah,” Keith finds himself saying after a brief consideration of how disastrous Shiro showing up at his job would be, smile slowly growing. “That will probably work. I’m working bar all of this weekend, if you’re free to come in then?”

Shiro’s face lights up. “Definitely.”

“We’ll try to make Lotor extra angry. He loses his accent; it’s hilarious.”

“I look forward to it,” Shiro laughs, and Keith lets the warmth of it carry him through the rest of the day.

***

Matt does in fact get better, and when Keith deems him well enough to return to school, Keith calls both his jobs to let them know he’ll be returning as well.

Lance and Hunk invite themselves over for dinner, something that Keith doesn’t fight too hard since Hunk offers to order everyone pizza. Keith indulges himself in a bottle of the crappy beer that Lance brought along, and the three of them, along with Matt and Pidge, settle in the living room while waiting for the pizza to arrive.

“Hunk!” Matt jumps off the back of the couch and onto Hunk’s lap, and if Keith wasn’t sure he was feeling better, he knows it now. Pidge follows her brother’s lead and hops off the couch, too, except her landing is less graceful and she rolls to the floor instead, giggling all the way down.

“Okay, enough climbing on things,” Keith warns, but Pidge is already crawling her way up Lance, little hands grabbing onto the drawstrings of his hoodie and pulling herself up. Keith cringes as her elbow digs its pointy self into Lance’s eye socket, who only laughs and hollers in encouragement when she jumps from his lap to the coffee table, knocking over a decorative candle in all of her great finesse.

“Did you guys sneak them sugar when I wasn’t looking?” Keith asks his friends, eyes narrowed. He’s mostly joking and is actually quite happy to see Matt steadily returning to his normal self, but he has to act the role of a concerned legal guardian  _ some  _ of the time. 

Matt chooses that moment to burp directly into Hunk’s ear before running off to his and Pidge’s room, and Keith curses his own bad timing.

“No, we’re always like this!” Pidge says, and he can’t argue with that.

“Yeah, they’re always like this,” Lance agrees, dodging a pillow Pidge chucks at him with alarmingly good aim. 

Matt returns with a Transformer in hand and holds it up to Keith. “Keith, remember when we went to the doctor ‘cause I was sick?”

“Mhm.”

“Was I dreaming, or was the doctor a cyborg?”

“A  _ what?” _ Pidge says, at Matt’s side an instance later.

“A cyborg. Part human, part robot—”

Pidge grabs the Transformer and tosses it to the ground. “I know what a cyborg is, idiot.” She turns to Keith and takes his hands in hers. “You took Matt to meet a cyborg?”

“He had an actual robot hand,” Matt says before Keith can reply. “It can probably be turned into a weapon of mass destruction,” he adds with a shrug.

Pidge’s grip on his hands becomes painful as she squeezes her nails into his skin. “No fair! I want to be sick. Quick, cough into my mouth.”

“Stop,” Keith says, pulling Pidge away before Matt can do just that. “Go find something to do that doesn’t involve sharing germs.”

Lance jumps in at this. “Oh, I have a good idea. Yo, Matt, bring out the Nerf guns!”

“No,” Keith says at the same time that Pidge shouts, “ _ Yes.” _

“I don’t know guys, you remember what happened last time,” Hunk says. Oh, Keith remembers, and probably so does everyone else on his floor, including his neighbor Dave who threatened to call CPS when mistaking Matt’s victory hoot for a cry for help a few months back. Keith can’t even walk to the mailbox without feeling judged when passing by Dave’s peephole, knowing his little beady eyes are waiting for Keith’s next big parenting mistake. “Maybe we can just watch a movie or play a calming game of Mario Kart or—”

Hunk doesn’t get to finish his sentence when a Nerf dart nails him square in the forehead (and Keith really should question why his kids are so good at hitting other humans in the head with such precision). Hunk dramatically throws himself over the couch’s armrest, wheezing out one last breath of betrayal before going so still that even Keith is convinced he’s dead for a hot second.

Matt, gun in hand, only has so long to practice his best maniacal villain laugh before Lance and Pidge are at either of his sides, Lance holding the boy back as Pidge grabs an armful of weapons from the tub he dragged in. Once sufficiently equipped they throw themselves behind the couch with their own deranged war cries, and soon Keith’s living room is a warzone. He’s going to stand back at a comfortable distance when Matt shoots him his most pitiful, big, brown puppy-dog eyes that Keith’s never been good at resisting. He scoops up Matt in one arm and swipes a crossbow with the other, all while dodging the various objects being thrown at him. Kosmo chews on the discarded darts before Keith can recollect them, but he figures out a way to weaponize the saliva covered bullets and shoots those directly at his opponents’ faces. Before long their fight is exactly the loud, torturous-sounding excitement he feared it would be, but he’s laughing just as much as everyone else and Dave’s lonely ass calling CPS for his daily dose of human interaction is the last thing on his mind.

The quarrel ends precisely at the sound of a knock on the front door, signaling the arrival of pizza. It’s almost funny how fast this shapes his kids up, whose heads peek up from their hiding places like dogs at the word  _ treat. _

“I’ll get it!” Matt says, pushing Pidge away so he can get to the door first. Hunk follows behind, not before Matt opens the door, points a Nerf gun at the delivery guy, and says in the deepest voice he can muster, “Unleash the pepperoni, great bearer of pizza.” 

Keith hears rather than sees Pidge hurry behind him, the sound of coins crashing to the floor accompanied by a booming, “Keep the change, you filthy animal!”

“Your kiddos are pretty awesome, man,” Lance says to him as they watch them help Hunk bring paper plates and napkins into the living room.

Pidge carries a pizza box above her head and smiles when she catches Keith watching her, cheeks puffing up as she shows off her newly grown in front teeth. Keith smiles back, his chest warm, and says, “Yeah, sometimes they’re alright.”

After dinner, Keith scrolls mindlessly through his phone as Matt and Pidge drag their guests into some game on their DS’s. He yawns as he swipes through notifications, mostly spam from his email. Despite staying home from work the past few days and having ample time to rest, he’s more tired than he realized, eyes drooping shut every couple of minutes before snapping open again at the sound of the kids’ games. His sleep schedule is truly horrendous, especially now that he’s trying extra hard to finish Shiro’s book before their next meeting.

He must drift off at some point and is startled awake by two owlish eyes blinking inches before his own face.

“Oh good, you’re awake!” Lance says, followed by a loud, “Ow! Watch the money maker, man!” when Keith shoves him away with a hand in his face.

“Why can’t you wake me up like a normal person,” Keith mumbles, rubbing his stiff neck and groaning at the lump he feels there. “What time is it?”

“It’s the witching hour.”

Keith’s brain is too tired for this. “The what?”

“Oh come on dude. You’re  _ way _ too creepy of a person not to know. Three a.m.?”

Keith shoots up. Three in the morning on a school night? He scans the room for Matt or Pidge, but they’re nowhere in sight.

Hunk’s head pops up beside his and as if he can read minds, he says, “Don’t worry, I already put them to bed hours ago.”

Of course Hunk would think to do so; he’s the only responsible one out of the three of them. Keith sighs and rubs a hand over his tired eyes. “Thanks, Hunk.” He pats around in search for his phone until he notices Lance tapping away at it next to him.

“Why do you have my phone?” he asks.

Lance’s face is the only bright-point in the room, illuminated by the screen of the phone as he continues tapping. “Mine died and me and Hunk got bored playing Matt’s game of Nintendogs. He only has corgis and they’re all flea infested.”

And Matt tried to argue that he should have his own real corgi. As if. Keith snorts. “You guys didn’t have to stay. I have work tomorrow morning anyway.”

“Nah, we wanted to hang out,” Hunk says. “We haven’t had a chance to all just chill in a while.”

“Thanks, guys. But give me back my phone.”

Lance flinches away from Keith’s attempt to grab his phone.  _ “No. _ ”

“Lance—”

“I’m doing something  _ important _ —”

Keith manages to yank the phone from Lance’s grasp and looks down at the Google search on the screen.  _ “How many sit-ups to a six pack _ ,” Keith reads aloud, just to be a dick.

“Hey! That’s personal.”

Keith and Hunk laugh while Lance reaches for the leftover pizza, crossing one arm over his chest while he chomps down on a slice.

“You guys are making me stress-eat,” he says through a mouthful of pizza. “Now I’ll never have abs of steel.”

“Why would you want to when pizza exists?” Hunk says.

“Touch é , my dude.”

Keith’s first instinct when getting his phone back is to pull up Facebook to make sure Lance or Hunk didn’t tag him in some unflattering picture of himself while he was asleep. He accidentally hits the messenger app instead though and his whole mood sours as he sees his last conversation. His friends must notice, because they both lean over his shoulder to look.

“Whoa, Keith has a friend who isn’t one of us?” Lance says.

“A lady friend?” Hunk adds, eyebrows quirking up.

“No way you have more game than me. Who is she?”

Keith pushes both of them away, frustration threatening to make him snap. “She’s no one, guys. Just another woman claiming to be my mother.”

He hates the way Lance and Hunk share a look as if he’s not sitting right between them.

“Don’t you usually block people when they send you those kind of messages?” Hunk says, voicing the thought that’s weighing on all their minds.

“She only sent one message and I never use Facebook so I didn’t think to block her.” It sounds pathetic when he says it but he keeps it at that and hopes his friends stop talking about it as well.

“Well let’s see it then,” Lance pushes, “if it’s no one special. You can block her now.”

“Lance,” Hunk mumbles, but Lance doesn’t stop.

“It’s no big deal Keith, just show us.”

“Fine,” Keith says, knowing Lance won’t stop until he gets his way. He brings the message back up. “See? Just another dumb scammer.”

As his friends read the message, Keith grows more and more clammy in his seat despite the chill in the room. It feels as if they’re reading his personal diary even though he isn’t the one who wrote the message.

“Dude,” Hunk says, voice seeming louder than it is in the deafening silence of the room. “She… sounds kind of legit.”

“Have you looked at her profile yet?” Lance says.

“No.” Keith’s throat feels tight when he says it, because  _ finally _ he’s not dealing with this alone.

“Maybe you should?”

They’re silent for a long moment before Keith nods. “Yeah… yeah, sure.”

He taps on the small icon leading to her profile and nearly drops his phone in his lap when her page loads.

“Whoa,” Hunk breathes at the same time Lance says, “Holy cheese balls.”

The woman is almost the spitting image of himself. Definitely older, in her late thirties to early forties, but she has the same sharp eyes, the same thin lips, the same East Asian features that Keith sees in the mirror every day. He turns off the phone screen and stands abruptly, ignoring the shocked looks on his friends’ faces.

“I’m going to bed,” he says, though he makes no move to leave the living room. “You two can stay and hang out, if you want. Goodnight.”

“Keith, wait.” Lance grabs the sleeve of his jacket and pulls him back to the couch. “We should talk about this.”

“That’s my mom.” Saying it out loud doesn’t make it feel any more real. Lance sets a hand on his knee and Hunk pulls him closer to his side. “ _ Fuck.” _

“Keith,” Hunk says, but Keith feels like he can’t catch his breath.

“Why did Acxa not tell me? Why the fuck did she keep something this big from me? This is fucking  _ ridiculous _ . She was talking to our mother and she  _ knew _ this would upset me.”

“Keith,” Lance says. Keith drops his head in his hands and squeezes his eyes shut, the lump in his throat growing tighter. “You’re right—she  _ did _ know it would upset you. She was probably just waiting for the right time to bring it up. She definitely wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

His hands are shaking now, but no matter how hard he tries he can’t will them to stop. Deep breaths aren’t working either; he’s truly out of control. “I know. I fucking  _ know _ . But what the hell am I supposed to do? I have bills to pay, and kids to feed and watch over and keep healthy and happy. I don’t have time for some piece of shit who left her two kids to rot in foster care so she could fuck off on some self-discovering journey. She can’t just try to reconnect with us two decades later when I’m still dealing with everything, and Axca is fucking  _ dead _ .”

He breaks off the sentence with a gasp, feeling too much as Lance and Hunk pull him into a tight hug. They stay quiet for a long time, Keith unable to form any cohesive thought.

Lance is the one to break the silence. “I think you should message her back,” he says, rubbing Keith’s back. “See what she has to say. If anything, it’ll bring you closure and you’ll never have to talk to her again.”

Hunk nods. “I’m with Lance on this one. Maybe there was a good reason Acxa was in contact with her.”

“Or why she kept it secret from me,” Keith grumbles, but he feels himself caving. He’s been curious (and anxious) about the message for weeks now; it’ll feel like a weight off his shoulders to finally reply.

“What do I even say?” he wonders aloud, looking from Lance to Hunk in question.

“Maybe don’t bring up anything personal just yet,” says Hunk. “Just let her know you’re interested in talking?”

In the end, Keith types the woman a short message explaining that Acxa never mentioned her but that Keith is willing to pick up where Acxa left off. He doesn’t mention that Acxa has passed away, and he doesn’t send the woman a friend request at Lance’s suggestion. He sends the message and then immediately closes the app, tossing his phone aside and leaning back into the couch.

“Well that was an interesting turn of events,” Lance says. “Also, just saying what we are all thinking: what kind of whack name is Krolia anyway?”

“It’s unique; I like it,” Hunk counters.

Lance gasps, flinching away from Hunk. “And take the side of the enemy? How dare you? Keith, I’m so sorry you have this as a friend.”

Keith huffs. “There are no sides, Lance. I… sorry for dumping all this emotional shit on you guys. It’s been bothering me for awhile now, but I shouldn’t have made you two have to deal with it too.”

“Hey, quit that apologizing.” Hunk bumps arms with him and smiles. “You can’t keep expecting yourself to handle everything on your own. Especially after—” Hunk stops himself, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where he was going with that. “Especially now. But you have to let us know when you need help, alright?”

Keith really won’t be doing that, but he agrees anyway, to put his friends at ease.

The back of a hand smacks him in the face as Lance throws his arms back in an exaggerated yawn. “Well I think it’s time for ol’ Lancey-Lance to hit the hay. Plus I’m pretty sure I forgot to feed Swimmy the Fifth this morning. And maybe yesterday morning? Being a fish parent is hard.”

“Looking forward to meeting Swimmy the Sixth,” Keith says, earning him a hard jab in the gut.

After he sees the pair out the door, Keith takes Kosmo out, checks on the kids, and rinses off in the shower. His late nap leaves him wide awake lying on his mattress even through his exhaustion, so he pulls out Shiro’s book, determined to finish. He lets the words lull him into the excitement of another world, one where he doesn’t have to think about bills or moms or kids. 

***

Keith wakes up to a book in his face and a message back from his mother… Krolia, he feels it’s more appropriate to call her.

_ Keith, thank you for getting back to me. I was beginning to worry that you wouldn’t respond, but I would understand why. I am a bit surprised that Acxa failed to mention me to you, since she talked about you quite a lot. Nonetheless, I’d love the opportunity to get to know you better, if you’ll let me. _

The message seems genuine, yet Keith feels strange replying. Why get to know him now when he’s already grown up and shaped to be his own person? They didn’t need each other in their lives; she’d made that clear when she’d left.

He still finds himself answering that he is willing to give her a chance, but makes no promises in developing a relationship beyond internet acquaintances.

He expects the question, but dreads it anyway when she asks,  _ And what of Acxa? How is she doing now? _

A vague answer of,  _ She’s not around _ , throws her off his trail, for now.

They message back and forth like that the next few days, nothing too personal exchanged, and despite his earlier hesitations he does feel better about the situation now that it’s no longer constantly weighing on him.

***

Friday night’s rush at the restaurant leaves him in a surly mood. He isn’t at all surprised (or upset) when his manager pulls him aside after a customer complaint on his “bad attitude” and “lack of attentiveness.” Keith knows he won’t be fired over the bitching of some crotchety old guy that thinks serving on the National Guard makes him a veteran worthy of a military discount. He knows that. It’s the  _ principle _ of it, and just once Keith wants to show his customers what a real bad attitude looks like and see if they’re brave enough to report him then. Really, he’s not that concerned about the matter. Still, getting written up by  _ Lotor  _ of all people is a thorn in his side and he returns to his position behind the bar, dragging his feet (and pride) along the way.

“Tough night?” he hears from behind the computer station. He starts, not expecting anyone to be in this late in the night.

But oh, he’s glad there is, because it’s Shiro sitting at the bar and waiting for a response.

Keith knows his own returning grin looks goofy.

“You came,” he says, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.

“Of course I did. I said I would, didn’t I?”

Yes, but that doesn’t mean Keith didn’t have his doubts.

“I’m happy you did. Tonight just about killed me.”

“Coworkers or customers?” Shiro asks with a knowing smirk.

“Both, if I’m being honest. Though mostly customers. I got called a commie bitch by some dude that should probably be dead because I wouldn’t discount his food for serving on the National Guard. I’m pretty sure he thought I was a girl the whole time.”

“No,” Shiro laughs. “What makes you think that?”

“He called in a complaint about the young lady behind the bar who served him.”

Shiro laughs again, Keith joining in. The whole thing really is ridiculously hilarious, when he thinks about it.

“The bastard better still have tipped you,” Shiro says, completely serious.

“Nah. But he didn’t eat any of his queso dip, so I did get a free appetizer out of it. Speaking of, what can I get for you?”

“Actually, I don’t have a lot of time.” Shiro gives him a hesitant smile. “I was probably just going to order to-go, if that’s alright with you?”

“Oh.” He knows he sounds as disappointed as he feels, but he  _ is _ a little hurt that Shiro doesn’t plan on staying as long tonight. Why even come in if he was just going to order to-go? “Yeah, sure thing.”

“I  _ did  _ plan on staying longer,” Shiro says, flipping through the menu Keith sets in front of him even while his eyes remain on Keith. “We have a book ending to discuss, after all.”

Keith leans his elbows on the bar, quirking an eyebrow at him. “Yes, I was promised a shoulder to cry on after reading so much unsolicited angst.”

“So dramatic _. _ It was a good ending!”

“A sad one. No good ending is sad.”

“False: all sad endings are good,  _ especially  _ if they make you cry.”

“Agree to disagree. But I’ll let you try to convince me later. You have somewhere to be, don’t you, Book Boy?”

Shiro looks away at that. “Yeah, sorry about that. I planned on hanging out but got a text from my brother on my way here that he needs someplace to crash tonight. I told him I’d grab us a bite to eat since I’d driven all the way up here.”

Keith shrugs. “Family comes first. Plus I’m literally always here, so you can stop by anytime.”

A small, warm smile from Shiro sends butterflies to his stomach. He has to look away or he’ll die on the spot.

Unfortunately, looking away puts him in the direct line of sight of Lance and Hunk, who, judging by their sly grins, have been standing nearby for awhile. When Lance catches him looking, he inches closer to Keith.  _ If you step any closer I will kill you with my bare hands _ , Keith communicates with the slant of his eyes.

_ Try me, _ Lance’s returning grin says. He slides up next to Keith and leans an arm on his shoulder.

“Heyo, Keith, my man, my bestie, my partner in crime. How you doing?” Keith opens his mouth and is precisely cut off by his so-called bestie. “That’s great, pal. Oh, who’s this fine looking gentleman you’re talking to here? No homo.”

Keith rolls his eyes. “This is my bar guest. Who’s in a hurry. Do you need something?”

Lance’s eyes narrow, clearly displeased that Keith isn’t playing along. “You two seem to be talking a lot for him being in a hurry, is all I’m saying.”

“Fine, this is Shiro. Shiro, my annoying coworker Lance and his much better half, Hunk.”

“Hi,” Hunk waves.

“Lance is the one who forever tainted my kids by making them watch the Star Wars prequels,” Keith explains.

Lance doesn’t give Shiro an opportunity to respond, hip cocked out as he fixes Keith with a glare. “Someone’s panties sure are in a twist tonight. It’s Keith’s, by the way. Also, he wears panties.”

“Okay,” Keith says, already pushing Lance out of the bar area. “Away from my guest, you’re scaring him.” Shiro’s muffled laughter says otherwise, and Keith feels utterly betrayed. He turns back to Shiro with narrowed eyes, lips pulled tight so a smile doesn’t slip through.

“Don’t laugh at him; you’re reinforcing his negative behavior,” he deadpans.

“Sorry, sorry.” Shiro pushes a hand through his bangs and smiles sheepishly. “It was kind of funny though.”

Keith glares “Traitor.”

“I’m not!” Shiro laughs. “I’m just making an observation. You guys seem pretty close?”

He plays it off as nonchalant, but Keith doesn’t miss the twinkle of interest in Shiro’s eyes. “Lance and Hunk were my roommates in college. They kind of forced me to be their friend at first, but we grew pretty close and I’m really lucky to have them. Though sometimes I fantasize about killing Lance, like now for instance.”

“I heard that!” Lance says from halfway across the restaurant, knocking a pitcher of water to the floor in the process of turning around. He curses loudly, earning an earful from Lotor, who’s also shouting across the restaurant.

Keith gestures in their direction, eyebrow raised. “See what I mean? Annoying, but loveable.”

Shiro chuckles, twiddling with the edges of the menu he’s still not looking at. Normally Keith hates when customers fuck with the pages like they own the place, but it’s somehow endearing watching Shiro do it with a dopey grin like he isn’t even aware he’s doing it himself.

“I know that feeling well,” Shiro says. “My little brother used to do everything in his power to embarrass the shit out of me in front of my friends, but I could never be mad at him for more than a minute.”

“No, that’s definitely not the same feeling. I’m still very much mad at Lance right now. I think you’re just a good brother.”

Shiro smiles. “I probably won’t be a good brother if I keep him waiting any longer.”

Shiro doesn’t take long to order a couple meals for him and his brother and Keith rings them in quickly. Unfortunately, he can’t give Shiro a free meal this time since Lotor’s been on his ass the entire night, but Shiro assures him it’s fine, handing him a fifty and telling him to keep the change. It’s over a forty-percent tip, which under normal circumstances Keith would accept in a heartbeat, but Keith feels a bit uneasy pocketing the money even while Shiro insists it’s for the great service.

When Shiro’s order comes up, Keith bags it up and takes it to Shiro, reluctant to hand it over. Who knows how long it’ll be before he sees him again, if ever. He wonders if this is maybe a good time to ask for his number, but Keith’s never asked for  _ anyone’s _ number before and isn’t entirely sure that they are at that point in their friendship yet. He settles for staring awkwardly at Shiro, mouth moving but no words coming out.

Luckily, Shiro saves him from the horror of looking like an idiot and speaks for both of them. “Thanks for the quality service yet again. I’ll make sure to put in a nice word to management about the sweet young lady working behind the bar.”

Keith prays his laugh is distracting enough to cover up the god-awful flush he feels in his cheeks, but he claps a hand over his face just to be safe. “Stop, the wound is still fresh. My feelings were  _ hurt _ .”

“Not as bad as the feelings of the guy you wouldn’t give the discount to. He served on the  _ National Guard _ , Keith. He’s seen some things. Terrible things.”

“Oh my god.” Keith feels dizzy at how much he’s laughing. He has to lean against the bar to regain his balance .“I should have just given him the discount. I’m an awful human being.”

“The worst.”

“I’m going to hell.”

“It seems very likely at this point.”

“ _ Stop, _ my pride can’t take anymore,” Keith says, grinning. He feels his expression slip into something a little more genuine. “But thank you for coming in again, Shiro. You made my night a lot better.”

“Mine too. Though I wish I could’ve stayed longer.”

Now’s his chance. Now is the perfect opportunity to ask for Shiro’s number, or Facebook, or Snapchat, or whatever the kids are using these days. Yet Keith’s mouth  feels dry, the moment stretching out where he should be saying something but can’t seem to form words to save his life.

“Y-yeah, me too,” he finally manages, the opportunity missed. He mentally bitch slaps himself, but even as Shiro moves to stand up, he still can’t bring himself to ask.

“I was wondering, though,” Shiro says as he gathers his wallet and bag, squaring his shoulders and looking at Keith thoughtfully. “I know you said you’re pretty busy right now, but Tommy’s has an all-you-can-drink special every Saturday night for ten dollars, if you maybe wanted to go out after your shift?”

Of all things he expects Shiro to ask, this is not it. Shiro is definitely asking him out on a date. Yeah, Keith assumed he was single, judging by his lack of a ring and late night visits—no married man is going out to eat alone this late at night. But for him to actually be interested in pursuing a relationship with  _ Keith _ , for Keith’s feelings to be mutual...

Keith feels his pulse pick up at the thought of going out with Shiro. He’s pretty much never had this sort of instant connection with someone in his entire life, nor has he ever wanted to get to know someone as bad as he wants to know Shiro. (Not to mention that he’s insanely attractive and literally meets every one of Keith’s ridiculous standards.) It’s the perfect scenario, Shiro asking him out, and hadn’t he just been speculating on how to do the same (though less forward) minutes ago?

Still, something makes him hesitate against instantly saying yes. Keith’s first priority in life is his kids—he promised Acxa that years ago, before they were even legally in his care. What kind of uncle would he be if he wasted the only free time he had on himself? He’s already thought this through before, the last time Shiro asked to meet up with him.

His internal struggle most show on his face, because Shiro adds with a kind smile, “Feel free to say no. I promise it won’t hurt my feelings.”

Keith worries his lips between his teeth. He  _ really _ wants to go—Matt and Pidge will have to go to bed not long after he gets off work anyway. He hears someone clear their throat behind him and glances over his shoulder to see Hunk and Lance nodding their heads and mouthing  _ yes, say yes _ .

“Um, I definitely want to go, but…”

“Me and Hunk want to go too!” Somehow Lance ends up at his side, slinging an arm around his shoulder. He’s sweating from the heat lamps behind them and Keith fights to shrug him off. “We love bars! If that’s alright with you, Shiro?”

Keith actually wants to kill him. He is  _ going  _ to kill him. There are knives not two feet behind him, or a stapler within reaching distance. Hell, he’ll use his own two hands if push comes to shove.

Shiro seems a little surprised too, glancing briefly at Keith before shrugging. “Yeah, of course. The more the merrier, right?”

“Well if we’re going then it’ll just be awkward if you don’t, Keith,” Lance reasons, trying again to sling a sweat-damp arm around his shoulders.

Keith steps aside just as Lance leans in and the latter falls hard into the edge of the counter. “I’ll have no one to watch Matt and Pidge.”

Lance pushes himself off the counter as if his ribs didn’t just slam into a pointy hard surface. “Veronica can! She owes me a favor anyway.”

“I can’t ask your sister to babysit my kids.”

“Nonsense! She loves them.”

Keith knows for a fact that isn’t true. She  _ tolerates  _ them at best, and only because she liked Acxa. “Lance…”

“It’ll be late anyway. All they’ll do is sleep. Come on, Keith.”

Keith glances at Hunk, who’s nodding his head, then to Shiro. He really shouldn’t, but...

“Alright.”

“Alright?” Shiro says with raised eyebrows.

“Yeah, I’ll go,” he says with a little more confidence and Lance hoots beside him. 

“Yes,  _ finally _ !” He reaches over and forcibly pumps Shiro’s hand a couple times in what must be an incredibly moist handshake. “Thank you, mister, we’ve been trying to get Keith to go out for ages. I owe you my firstborn. Or maybe my second; I owe a couple other people too---”

“Please go away,” Keith says, prying him off Shiro and pushing him out of the bar for good this time. Lance lets him, already chattering on to Hunk about what he’s going to wear. Keith gives Shiro an apologetic look. 

“Sorry he just invited himself. He was standing too far away from Hunk to be able to use their brain cell. I’ll tell them they can’t come.”

Shiro shrugs. “It’s really fine with me. It sounds like they just want to hang out with you too.”

“Well…” Keith hesitates. In truth, the night does sound a lot less intimidating with the promise of his friends as a buffer. “I guess if you’re okay with it.” 

“I am,” Shiro says. He shuffles his bags of take-out to one hand so he can offer Keith his phone. “I’ll text you and we’ll figure out the logistics?”  

They trade phone numbers and pleasantries until Shiro says he really does need to be getting home. Keith stares after him as he leaves and wills himself not to freak out. It’s just an outing with a couple of friends like any other time he’s gone to the bars; what could possibly go wrong?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Promise the wait won't be so long next time! Thanks for reading:)


	4. Chapter 4

Keith grimaces, unable to tear his eyes away from the scene before him.

“Everything about this is wrong,” he says.

Hunk hums beside him. “It’s mostly just sad, I think.”

They’re in Lance’s room, which is a horror within itself, but even the curdling bowls of leftover Frosted Flakes and Taco Bell bags scattered around the room can’t draw his attention away from what Lance is doing on the bed. 

“Almost got it,” Lance huffs, doing some kind of backbend over the side while trying to get his obscenely tight jeans to button. “I swear these get smaller every time I try them on. It’s a conspiracy or something. Apple’s probably in on it.”

His hips wriggle a little in an attempt to pull more fabric towards the middle. He’s been at it for a good twenty minutes and Keith hasn’t been able to look away once.

“I’ll give this to him,” Hunk says, seemingly in the same boat of morbid fascination as Keith. “He’s dedicated.”

“To what, going sterile before the age of 25?”

“Hey, I take good care of the merchandise,” Lance says. He plants his feet on the bed and raises his hips up to demonstrate. “The cherries get tucked down here to the left and the eggplant nestles real neat to the right here. Everything’s in good working order, I assure you.”

“Sure Jan,” Hunk says and he and Keith snicker together.

It feels nice to goof off just the three of them. They haven’t gone out together like this for a long time. Even nights where Keith hasn’t had to work, he’s been at home with his kids. It lends the night a nostalgic edge, all of them feeling a little more like the dumb kids they used to be through most of college. Keith would be a little more excited if the whole point of the night wasn’t to see Shiro again.

The truth is he’s nervous. He likes Shiro, likes him a lot, but they haven’t spent time with each other outside of work. He doesn’t know how things will play out without the buffer of a professional setting. More than that, he’s worried he’s going to be a complete downer. He was never much one for going out in his short-lived youth, and even then it was almost always solely with Lance and Hunk or when Acxa forced him out with her friends. Socializing has never been one of his strong suits. Socializing with someone as attractive and witty as Shiro will probably kill him and he doesn’t even have life insurance for the kids to cash out on.  

“Ha,” Lance says once he finally manages to snag the button through the loop. He jumps to his feet and turns around to admire himself in his full length mirror. “Dang, look at this butt. Might just pull tonight, boys.”

“Pull a muscle maybe, trying to walk in those,” Keith says.

Lance shoots him a glare through his reflection. “You’re just jealous your butt doesn’t look as good as mine and Shiro’s gonna notice.”

“Pretty sure he’s not into shrink-wrapped chicken leg in denim, but thanks for the concern.”

The corner of Lance’s mouth twitches. “This is what god intended when he invented butts, Keith. Grow up.”

“I don’t even believe in god and I know he didn’t want this.”

“That’s blasphemy.”

“Your ass is blasphemy.”

Lance’s face twists in disbelief before he splutters out a laugh. Keith and Hunk join in and Keith immediately feels a little lighter. He’s suddenly glad his friends are going with him tonight. If nothing else, he’s missed being with them like this, without the pressures of work or kids getting in the way. He lets himself lean a little into Hunk’s side.

“That didn’t even make sense,” Lance says, He starts finger combing his hair in an attempt to tame it, but only forms a crest on top of his head. Keith resists the urge to make another chicken jab. “I should have forced you to go to mass with me more.”

“I never learned anything anyway,” Keith says, closing his eyes. He feels Hunk’s arm come up to wrap around his shoulders.

“You okay?” Hunk asks. He’s always been the nice friend in their group.

Keith nods. “Yeah. Just nervous.”

“I get that. But it’s obvious Shiro already really likes you. This is just like any other time you’ve seen him.”

“Yeah, besides you have us,” Lance cuts in. “We’re like, your wingmen or something. Look, Hunk’s already got you under his wing.”

Hunk folds his arm into a wing and flaps it a little over Keith until he laughs.

“Yeah, thanks guys,” he says. “You’re right. I’m just worried. You know how shit I am at talking to people.”

Hunk’s expression turns disapproving. “Okay, let’s try that again, but with no negative comments about yourself.”

“Please don’t make me do this,” Keith says. He tries to wiggle out from under Hunk’s arm, but the guy’s deceptively strong and pins him in.

Hunk’s hold on him is firm as he says, “This is my house and I say no negativity.”

“It’s a cesspit of negativity,” Keith scoffs. “Lance lives here.”

“Just say one nice thing about yourself,” Hunk says, ignoring him. His lower lip sticks out in an exaggerated pout. “Please? One little thing?”

Keith huffs. “Fine. I have a better ass than Lance.”

Lance whirls around from where he’s been preening. “You take that back! There’s no lying in this house either.”

Hunk uses his arm over Keith to pull him up and start weaving them through the trash and out of Lance’s room. “Okay, time to go now. Don’t wanna be late to Keith’s date.”

In the living room they find Pidge and Matt watching TV with Veronica. They’d all decided that Lance and Hunk’s apartment would be a nice neutral space for her to watch the kids in. Keith has the nagging suspicion she just doesn’t want to come to his place because she thinks it’s dirty.

Both his kids give him giant hugs before he leaves. Pidge in particular doesn’t want to let go.

“You’re coming back, right?” she whispers in his ear, breath smelling sweetly of things she really shouldn’t be having before bedtime. Her hand tangles in his hair and he’s hit with a wave of guilt for leaving them for the night all over again. His arms tighten around her.

“Yes, I’ll be back before you even wake up in the morning.”

She pulls back to blink hopefully up at him. “Can I sleep with you then?”

He wipes at a popcorn kernel sticking to her cheek. “I won’t be back that early. You get to have a sleepover, though. Kinda cool, right?” 

“I guess,” she shrugs, and Keith almost makes up his mind to stay home then and there. He might have, if Pidge hadn’t then wrinkled her nose and asked, “Why is Lance dressed like that?”

“Yeah, he’s dressed like a slut,” Matt pipes up from where he’s been standing beside them.

Keith’s mouth drops open. “The hell guys, where did you even hear---” His eyes immediately narrow on Lance. He’s standing by Veronica, laughing in his stupidly tight jeans, and doesn’t even realize that his chances of survival are quickly dwindling.

“Look,” he says, taking both kids by the shoulder, “don’t say that word, okay? It’s a really derogatory word and is usually used about women in a bad way.”

“Like pussy?” Matt asks, eyes wide behind his glasses.

“Yes, like---” He drops his head into his hand before pulling up and pointing at them both. “Yes. Don’t ever say those words. Not just because they’re Bad Words, but because they hurt people’s feelings and are mean. Also, you’re never allowed to hang out with Lance again.”

“Lance didn’t say that word! I heard it on YouTube,” Matt argues.

“Fine, no YouTube ever again either.”

He avoids that argument by ignoring their whining and walking straight out the door. By the time Lance and Hunk join him outside in front of the building, he’s chain smoking. Lance’s eyebrows do a judgey little wiggle when he lights up again, but he’s stressed and doesn’t really give a shit about the longevity of his lungs at the moment. They take the subway and then walk the rest of the way to the bar they’re supposed to meet Shiro at. When it comes into view, Keith wonders all over again why out of all the bars in the city Shiro had to choose this one.

Tommy’s is the kind of place Keith would go to if he was straight and wanted to punish his wife for his favorite football team losing the playoffs. It’s like Applebee’s, but with less sports paraphernalia and a higher drink cutoff limit. The bar always features the same cast of white middle-aged men who whine about the Eagles and act like drinking anything other than IPAs is an offense against the nation and possibly god. Keith usually avoids the place like the plague, but he forces himself to follow along inside after Lance and Hunk.

Shiro already has a table for them when they arrive. He’s in dark-washed jeans and a gray pullover that stretches agreeably across the width of his shoulders. Keith suddenly feels a little underdressed in his typical boots and messy ponytail. The jacket he’s wearing had seemed artfully distressed when he put it on, but now it just seems frumpy and exactly like the thrift store find that it is. He considers tossing it and braving the night in his undershirt, but Shiro chooses that moment to look up and flash him a genuine smile.

“Hey,” he says, looking like he might go in for a hug before awkwardly patting him on the shoulder. “Glad you could make it.”

“Yeah,” Keith says and then immediately feels stupid because he can’t think of anything else to add.

“You look really nice,” Shiro continues. Keith ducks his head to hide his expression, hoping how pleased he is isn’t written across his face.

“Well, yeah,” Lance cuts in, coming to stand beside Keith. “He always looks nice. Real looker, our Keith.”

He throws what he considers a subtle wink at Keith. Apparently being his wing man means embarrassing the shit out of him. And Keith had thought he was going to be doing all of it himself.

Lance sticks his hand out to shake Shiro’s.

“Good to see you again, Shiro.”

“You too,” Shiro says agreeably. “And you as well Hunk.”

Hunk beams from Keith’s other side. The way his two friends are boxing him in almost feels like he’s got a security detail.

“Can I just say,” Hunk says, “I’m really glad we’re doing this. Keith has _so_ been looking forward to it.”

A security detail of _traitors_. Keith tries to keep the murderous intent off his face, but Hunk must sense it because he makes a dodge for their table. When he lands in his seat, he seems to notice at the same time Keith does that they’re not alone.

“Who’s your friend, Shiro?” Hunk asks.

Shiro takes a couple steps back and sets a hand on the guy’s shoulder.

“Hope you guys don’t mind,” he says, “but I invited my brother along. He’s in town for the weekend and wanted to come.”

The guy who gets up to shake Keith’s hand does bear a striking resemblance to Shiro, the same jet black hair and squared features. He’s definitely a younger brother, though. With his baseball cap and hipster-thick glasses, he looks like he could be Keith’s age.

“I’m Ryou,” he says to Keith. “And for the record, Shiro has really been looking forward to this too.”

Keith’s smile turns a little more genuine at that. Shiro gives Ryou a playful shove back to his seat.

“Okay, okay. Sit down,” he says good-naturedly.

At least Keith isn’t the only one who is going to have the shit embarrassed out of him tonight. He takes the chair beside Shiro.

Their table is tucked in a corner under a row of shaded lights on the wall. The bar isn’t packed, but there are enough people that making conversation is a little more difficult than normal. After they order their first round, they settle into the obligatory awkward small talk.

Apparently Ryou goes to school in the city too, but at a private university rather than the public one Lance, Hunk, and Keith all attended. He’s in his last year of an engineering degree and will probably graduate top of his class, if Shiro’s word is anything to go by.

“I keep telling him we need big brains like his in the medical field, but he wants to design computers,” Shiro says, grinning over his beer. “Complete waste of his potential if you ask me.”

Ryou doesn’t miss a beat. “Yeah, well not all of us can be almost-doctors.”

“How can you be an almost doctor?” Hunk asks.

“I’m a nurse practitioner. _Some_ people think you have to have a doctorate to be worth your Hippocratic Oath,” Shiro explains.

Ryou nudges him with an elbow and grins. “Biggest disappointment our family has ever seen. Our parents wanted him to go into cardiology and instead he’s a nurse, and in general medicine at that.”

“They wouldn’t speak to me for weeks,” Shiro says. “I think they only forgave me after Ryou started his degree and they could be proud of a son again.”

“Asian parents,” Ryou says and they laugh together.

Keith aches a little watching them. It’s plain to see that the two are close and have an easy relationship with each other, the kind that comes from a long shared history together. He and Acxa were the same way.

“Really though,” Ryou continues, “the only reason any of us put up with him is for Ally and Melle.”

Lance furrows his brows. “Ally and who?”

“Allura and Romelle,” Shiro tells him. “My daughters.

Lance’s mouth drops open. “Wait, what? Keith never told us you had kids!”

Ryou laughs. “You seem surprised.”

“Well, _yeah_.”

“You look young, is all,” Hunk says to Shiro.

“If you think that, wait until you hear how old they are,” Ryou says. “Melle is six and Ally is nine.”

Lance’s mouth drops open again and Hunk whistles. Keith barely manages not to roll his eyes. Why they’re surprised when he himself has kids at 23 is beyond him. He cuts in before Lance can find something stupid to say.

“They were a little older when he adopted them,” he says, catching Shiro’s eye and smirking. “He wasn’t a teen mom.”

Shiro’s smile softens as he returns his gaze. They probably hold it a bit too long, but no one else mentions it.

“Six and nine are good ages,” Lance says, almost wistfully. He left his family back in Cuba after he landed a place in their school’s math program, but Keith knows he misses having a murder of kids running around all the time. One of the reasons Keith ever lets him babysit Matt and Pidge is because he knows the offers are less out of pity and more because he actually enjoys it.

“I have some pictures if you guys want to see them?” Shiro asks and Ryou snorts.

“Yeah, that’s what everyone wants to see when they go to the bar.”

Keith sets down his bottle with a click. “I’d like to. I showed you mine, it’s only fair.”

Shiro shoots him a grateful look before pulling out his phone.

They all lean in. Shiro’s screensaver shows two little girls sitting on a porch swing, arms wrapped around each other. The smaller one is blonde with a butterfly tattoo on her cheek, smiling hugely and exposing her missing front teeth. The other looks a tad more composed, almost regal in her posture, with dark skin and perceptive eyes.

“That’s Allura,” he says, pointing to the older one. “And Romelle.”

“Aww,” Hunk coos. “They’re adorable.”

Keith agrees. Not only are they cute, but they both genuinely look happy. It’s not as if he didn’t know Shiro would be a great dad, but the physical proof is kind of getting to him. Not only is Shiro kind, hot, and a nurse, but a good dad too? It’s honestly too much and he feels a little dizzy with it.

They talk about the girls and Shiro’s job a bit more before the conversation shifts Keith’s way.

“So what do you do, Keith?” Ryou asks.

Keith tries not to fidget under everyone’s collective gaze. “Um, bartending lately. And some mechanic work. Whatever pays the bills, you know?”

“I didn’t know you did mechanic work,” Shiro says. “Like on cars?”

Keith nods. “And bikes. I never had any formal schooling or anything, but I know the owners and they trained me when I needed a job.”

“What he’s really good at is art,” Hunk says from across the table. His mouth is split in a big, toothy grin like he’s a proud father. “In school he got this huge following online and started making money commissioning stuff. It was really cool.”

Ryou looks genuinely impressed. “That’s awesome. I’ve always wished I could draw.”

“What kind of stuff do you do?” Shiro asks. “Painting or…?”

Keith shrugs. He leans back in his chair a bit, hoping to fall into a shadow dark enough to cover his discomfort. “Some painting, mostly colored pencil. It’s really not that big of a deal.”

“Pfffffft.” Lance waves him off. “Keith is amazing. He won this huge animation internship with like Disney basically and was all ready to head off to Chicago and make movies and stuff. Only reason he didn’t is cuz, well…” He trails off awkwardly as he realizes where that statement ends. He probably shoots Keith an apologetic look, but Keith avoids his gaze. This isn’t really something he wants to air out in front of people he barely knows, and especially not one he wants to like him. The absolute last thing he wants, though, is any kind of pity so he shrugs on his best unconcerned look before the table can descend into the kind of silence you don’t come back from.

“Kinda hard to fuck off to Chicago when you’ve got kids,” he says simply. “It was probably for the best. That giant bean thing creeps me out.”

That does the trick, as everyone seems to let out a collective breath of relief.

“Yeah, Chicago kind of sucks anyway,” Ryou agrees. “We took a trip there right after we moved here from Japan. Definitely not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“You guys lived in Japan?” Lance jumps on the change of subject with gusto and everyone follows suit.

They move from topic to topic pretty easily after that. As the night goes on, Keith feels himself fall away from the conversation a bit. He remembers now why he’s so bad at socializing. He’s an introvert at heart, but more than that he constantly seems to create awkward lulls in conversations.

His past has always been riddled with topics he’d rather avoid. Conversation falls a little flat when you have to avoid any mention of family, home, or the times you and your sister were homeless for significant portions of your teen years. People tend to find it a bit mood killing.

Now it’s even worse, because Acxa is gone. The one good thing he’s always carried in his life was his sister, and now even the best of his memories are tainted by her absence. It leaves him feeling ages older than the people around him. Ryou, Hunk, and Lance are still in school. They’re not worrying about kids or money or upsetting people with talk of their dead sister. It’s almost abrasive how different he suddenly finds himself from them.

“Hey, you okay?”

Keith blinks himself out of his thoughts and turns to find Shiro looking at him, eyes soft in concern.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Fine.”

“You kind of spaced out there for a second.”

Keith shrugs. “Just thinking.”

He fiddles with the label on his beer. Judging by their animated chatter, the others seem to have decided on a round of shots. 

“I’m sorry.”

Keith’s eyebrows shoot up as he meets Shiro’s contrite gaze. “For what?

“This place doesn’t really seem to be your scene,” Shiro says. He seems genuinely put out, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a frown. It looks wrong on his face; until now, Keith didn’t really believe he could do anything other than smile.

Keith spares a glance for the row of deer heads mounted on the wall and the guys trying to show off their pool skills beneath it. “I wouldn’t have thought it was yours either.”

“Huh, no, not really.”

Keith shoots Shiro a look from under his bangs. “ _You_ invited _me_ here, remember?”

“I panicked,” Shiro says, smiling a bit sheepishly. “I couldn’t think of a place fast enough and Ryou’s dragged me here a couple times before so it was the first place I thought of. I’m kind of embarrassed, really.”

Some of the loneliness eases off Keith’s shoulders. Shiro really does look just as uncomfortable as Keith feels. He’s still on his second beer and hasn’t touched any of the shots the boys have ordered for their table. Maybe he’s been feeling just as out of place as Keith.

“Honestly, I’m relieved,” Keith says, mood lifting with the revelation that he’s not as alone in this as he thought he was. “I thought you were a sports bro or something.”

Shiro must feel the shift, because he teases back, “There’s nothing wrong with liking sports.”

Keith lifts a sardonic finger toward the row of men yelling at some sporting event on the big screen TV. Shiro shrugs one shoulder.

“There’s nothing wrong with liking sports in moderation,” he amends.

Keith laughs. He wonders why he suffered through so much of the night in one of what Lance calls his emo episodes when he could have been talking to Shiro.

“Okay,” Keith says. “What sports do you moderately like, then?”

“I played baseball in high school.”

Keith huffs and takes a drink of his beer. “You would.”

“What?”

“You look like a baseball guy.”

“I’m going to choose to take that as a compliment,” Shiro says, eyeing him skeptically.

Keith isn’t subtle as he lets his gaze drop to linger over Shiro’s shoulders. “It is.”

Shiro seems to notice because he pauses for a moment before knocking back the rest of his beer. When he sets it down, he shifts a bit closer to Keith than before. He nods towards him.

“What about you?” he asks. “Any sports you moderately like?”

Keith shakes his head. “No. I’ve always been more of a nerd.”

Shiro huffs out a laugh. “You are not a nerd.”

“I am too.”

“No, you’re really not.”

Keith swivels sideways in his chair so he can face Shiro head on. “No, I _really_ am. Look at all the Sci-Fi shit I like.”

“Everybody likes Star Wars,” Shiro protests.

“Not just Star Wars. There are other things too.” He rifles through his memory for a moment before slamming a hand on his thigh. “I always win Rainbow Road on Mario Kart.”

Shiro’s eyes narrow, mouth quirking in repressed amusement. “That’s not nerdy, that’s just luck.”

“It is not, it’s a skill I’ve honed through years of practice.”

“Who do you main as?”

Keith pretends a sudden interest in the crisscrossing rafters of the ceiling.

“That’s not important,” he says. He fights back a smile when Shiro uses the few inches he has on him to try to force him into eye contact.

“Come on, who is it?”

“If you need to know,” Keith finally breaks. “It’s Bowser.”

Shiro barks out a laugh. “No nerd would ever main as Bowser. We all stick with Yoshi.”

“Oh, so you think _you’re_ a nerd now?” Keith says, pointing an accusing finger at his chest.

“I know I am.”

“Prove it.”

“I can watch anime without subtitles,” Shiro says, no hesitation.

Keith snorts. “Doesn’t count.”

“I was the DM of my D&D group all through college.”

“Everyone has a phase.”

“I have a world record for a Zelda speed-run I did in high school.”

That gives Keith pause. “Which game?”

“Ocarina,” Shiro says. He smiles at Keith’s dubious expression. “It’s on YouTube and everything. You can ask Ryou about it.”

“That’s more impressive than anything.” Keith grips the bottom of his chair and leans forward. Shiro mirrors him, the warm lighting of the bar catching the edges of his grin just right. “And we’re getting away from the real problem, anyway, which is that you don’t believe I’m a nerd.”

“I haven’t seen any tangible proof.”

Keith takes a long drink of his beer to give himself time to think. There’s no way he’s backing down, but now that he thinks about it he might not actually have anything to prove his claim.

“I guess I could show you my old Deviant Art account,” he begins before cringing. “Wait, actually no.”

Shiro muffles a snicker into his fist. “Do I even want to know what’s on there?”

“No, you really don’t.” Keith sinks into thought again. He knows there has to be something; he’s always been into weird things. Suddenly an idea hits him and he sits up straight.

“Okay, I have proof,” he says, “but we’d have to walk there.”

“Now?”

Keith grins at his incredulous expression. “Yeah, it’s not that far. Just a couple streets over, actually.”

“And it’ll prove to me that you’re a nerd.” It’s less a question than a statement of his skepticism. 

“Yup.”

Shiro pins him with an unconvinced stare for a couple moments longer and Keith matches it. He has a five year old; he knows how to win a staring contest. It works, because in the next moment Shiro relents.

“Okay then,” he says before turning to the rest of their group. “Guys, we’re heading out.”

Keith had almost forgotten about the rest of their table. He realizes just how close he and Shiro have migrated, knees nearly touching, and he pushes back a bit. The noise of the bar suddenly filters back in and the comfortable bubble he and Shiro had cultivated pops. It almost feels like waking up from a dream.

Ryou, Hunk, and Lance have attracted a couple people into some kind of debate on football of all things. Keith knows that Hunk and Lance have never watched a football game in their lives (Lance still thinks it’s funny to call it “foosball”), so he looks forward to the troll story he’s sure to hear the next day. None of them seem concerned about Keith or Shiro leaving.

“Have fun,” Lance says, waving them off. He doesn’t even look up from the oddly complicated series of gestures he’s demonstrating to a host of football dads.

Hunk at least shoots him a thumbs up and Ryou wiggles his eyebrows. He laughs when Shiro shoves his head down on his way past. Keith tosses the rest of his beer back and follows him.

The blast of frigid air that hits him when they step outside is a welcome relief after the bar’s oppressive warmth the past couple of hours. It’s a Saturday night, so the streets writhe with people ambling around from bar to bar. Keith has to push past a couple just to make it to the street’s edge and he catches scent of smoke on someone’s jacket. Out of habit his hand itches for a cigarette, but he doesn’t want Shiro to know about that dirty little secret just yet.

“So,” Shiro says, coming to a stop beside him with his hands shoved inside his pockets. “Where we heading?”

“This way,” Keith says and leads him down the sidewalk.

He takes him a couple streets over, down by the massive stretch of the Detroit River, and to a series of storefronts pressed a bit back from the noise of the main road. He can see Shiro examining each one like he’s trying to guess where Keith’s taking them. When Keith stops them in front of a window bathed in neon light, Shiro shoots him a puzzled look.

“An arcade?” he asks. Keith just hums and leads him inside.

In terms of actual age, the arcade has only been around a couple years. It used to be another bar before the current owner bought it cheap, invested in a couple second-hand games, and called it an arcade. It’s greasy, both literally and figuratively, but it’s served as a staple in Keith, Hunk, and Lance’s lives since their freshman year.

He bypasses the newer and fancier machines at the front of the building to find the real treasures tucked in the back. The neon is a little less jarring back here, all the machines a little older and dustier, but it still casts everything in a surreal glow. Keith weaves through the maze of machines on a path he’s nearly beaten into the chaotic bowling alley carpet before stopping in front of an older machine with a cartoon spaceship emblazoned on the front.

Keith pats the controls affectionately before leaning his hip against the side and crossing his arms.

“This is it,” he says.

“This is it?”

“Yup.”

Shiro looks between him and the flashing screen. “Are you going to… play it?”

“Don’t need to.”

The screensaver chooses that moment to switch to the list of high scores. Right there at the top flashes one K KOGANE in bright green. The second slot is also his, while the third is occupied by SHRPSHTR69 and trails by almost 50,000 points.

“Holy shit,” Shiro says, smiling as he slides in to run his hands over the controls. “How long have you had the record?”

“Three years.” He can’t keep the pride out of his voice. “I used to have all three, but Lance doesn’t like it when I’m good at things. I’ve been meaning to get over here and knock his name off.”

Shiro whistles. “That’s some dedication. I believe you about Rainbow Road now.”

Keith laughs. He suddenly feels a little silly dragging Shiro all the way here just to show him his stupid high score.

“I, uh, didn’t realize how dumb this actually is.”

Shiro grins at him, features painted in blues and greens from reflected light. “No way, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. If you were trying to convince me you’re a nerd, you chose the wrong thing.”

“You wouldn’t be saying that if you knew how much time I’ve spent in this place,” Keith says. “I have a couple other high scores around here. This is just the biggest one.”

“Not embarrassing.” Shiro says it firmly enough that Keith almost believes him. “Besides, if it’s nerdy to spend a lot of time on games then I win. My entire childhood was spent playing claw machines.”

Keith drops his pose against the side of the machine. “You can actually do those? I’ve never won and I’ve tried. A lot.”

“They’re really popular in Tokyo,” Shiro says, shrugging. “It’s basically all we did after school.”

“Well, now you have to show me.” Keith pushes out of his usual slouch to peer around the building. Quarry spotted by the back wall, he motions for Shiro to follow him. “Tangible proof, remember?”

“That’s a lot of pressure,” Shiro says, but allows himself to be led to a large glass box filled with stuffed animals. The text across the top proclaims that anyone can be a winner, but Keith’s spent enough quarters here to know that’s a lie.

He waits impatiently as Shiro makes change and starts his game. Shiro takes his time lining the claw up, even checking from either side to make sure it’s where he wants it. It’s a long process that ticks through most of the game’s time limit. When Shiro catches him watching, his lips quirk self-consciously.

“I feel like you’re making fun of me,” he says, eyes going back to his calculations.

“I’m not.”

“I didn’t make fun of you and your high score.”

Keith laughs. “I’m just watching.”

It’s true, but it’s Shiro he’s watching more than the game. His gaze is laser focused on the machine in front of him, ears a bit red from the cold or maybe his embarrassment. The intense set of his features would be funny if Keith didn’t think it was so cute.

Shiro hits the button that sends the crane spiraling down perfectly over one of the plushies. The chain gives a sharp lurch and begins to spool up. This is the part where Keith always loses; he presses up against the glass excitedly when something hooks and begins rising with the crane. As it pulls free, Shiro curses and Keith starts laughing

“That is _not_ what I was aiming for,” Shiro says as the Minion doll lazily spins and drops into the hatch. When he retrieves it, Keith laughs even harder.

It’s probably the ugliest doll he’s ever seen, with big goggle eyes and sprigs of hair sticking straight up from its head like growths on a potato. Shiro holds it gingerly by one overall strap, disgust putting a curl to his lips. Keith’s sides start to stitch with how hard he’s laughing.

He almost pulls it together, but then Shiro has to say, “I was aiming for the dog,” in a truly dismayed tone and he’s losing it all over again.

“Are you sure, _ha_ , are you sure you’re actually good at this?” he asks though his tears.

“You really are making fun of me,” Shiro says, but he’s smiling. He looks ridiculous bathed in the pink glow of the machine’s lights and holding a plushy like it’s going to bite him.

When Keith can’t seem to pull himself together, Shiro makes as if to put the doll back in the machine’s drop box. Keith grabs for it.

“Wait, wait, I’m going to use this to scare my kids.”

“ _Keith_ ,” Shiro complains, but lets him snatch it out of his hands.

“I’m kidding,” Keith says, finally sucking in some much needed air. He pulls the doll close and pokes at its gaping smile. “It’s really not that bad, though.”

Shiro inspects it over his shoulder. He doesn’t seem to share Keith’s sentiment, judging by the way he grimaces at the doll. “I can’t stand these things. Romelle went through a Minion stage and now I can’t hear the word ‘banana’ without wanting to pull my hair out.”

“I guess I’m lucky my kids hated the movie.”

“You really are,” Shiro agrees. He reaches a hand out. “Here, let me have it. I’ll get something better, I promise.”

“No way,” Keith says, jerking the doll away from his reach and hiding it behind his back. “You won it for me. It’s mine now.”

He must look like a mess, tears in his eyes and face blotchy from laughing. Shiro’s grinning down at him, though, and he feels _happy_ for what feels like the first time in months. And it’s all because of a stupid Minion doll. Well, he amends as Shiro starts laughing too, not exactly because of the doll.

It takes some time to pull themselves together. Each time they get close, Keith just has to look at the doll and he’s lost again, Shiro following suit every time. When they do finally manage to sober up, they mess around on a couple different machines until Keith remembers that the arcade serves food and Shiro buys them both a slice of pizza and a coke.

They eat walking outside along the riverfront, their path mostly deserted thanks to the bite of the wind coming up off the water. Keith shivers in his thin jacket, but they’re pressed close enough together that it doesn’t matter. They take their time admiring the haze of lights that mark Canada across the river and listening to the lap of water at the shore.

Keith breaks the silence first. “So I guess this means I win.”

“Nope,” Shiro says, his breath coming out like smoke in the night air. “I’m more convinced than ever that you’re just really cool.”

“You saw the score. I proved it.”

“You didn’t prove shit.”

They laugh and Keith presses his grin into Shiro’s arm. He feels floaty in a way he can’t recall ever feeling before, like his muscles are filled with liquid heat. He wishes they really were, because he can’t suppress the stunted shiver his body gives when a gust of wind hits them. Shiro notices and frowns. His arm comes up to settle feather-light over Keith’s shoulders. When Keith doesn’t shake it off, he lets it settle a little more fully across his back and his prosthetic fingers curl around his arm. Keith tries to keep as still as possible so he doesn’t scare him off. The liquid heat burns through his veins.

He smiles sheepishly. “Sorry I was an idiot and didn’t wear a coat.”

“Did you forget it at Tommy’s?”

“No, I um.” He tries to think of something less incriminating than the truth and fails. “It ruined my look.”

Shiro laughs and Keith feels it like his own. “It what?”

“It looked stupid with my jacket,” Keith says, trying for a nonchalant shrug. “I was trying to look cool.”

Shiro shakes his head, still grinning. “Trust me, you really don’t need to worry about that.”

Keith’s heart beats out of turn. He covers it with a teasing look up at Shiro.

“No?” he asks.

Shiro huffs and looks at the ground, but his arm remains a heavy weight over Keith’s shoulders.

They walk a bit more until they find themselves under the big, fake lighthouse the city put in as a tourist attraction. Leaning against the railing over the riverfront, Keith watches the swoop of the light out over the glass surface of the water. The bulk of downtown is still behind them, but far enough away that it’s just a distant bustle. Keith folds his arms over the railing and Shiro’s arm falls from his shoulders.

“I thought of something else, actually,” Shiro says after a moment and Keith turns to look at him. He doesn’t meet his gaze, eyes turned up toward where the stars would be if they weren’t in the middle of the city. “I think this one will really win it for me. The nerd thing, I mean.”

Keith snorts. “Go ahead, then.”

Shiro takes in a measured breath, like he’s steeling himself for something.

“I always sit in corner booths when I go to restaurants,” he begins. “I like to read and be anti-social when I’m by myself, so I sit as far away from other people as possible.”

Keith’s about to interrupt and tell him that’s really not that weird when Shiro keeps talking.

“This one time, though, I walked into a place and there was this really cute guy working the bar. He looked kind of angry, but then his friend made him laugh and my breath caught because he was so beautiful.”

The air stills in Keith’s lungs. Shiro still isn’t looking at him, but his lips curve over a smile.

“So I went and awkwardly sat at the bar and pretended to read while thinking of a hundred different ways to start a conversation, just hoping he would talk to me. When he finally did, I realized I was kind of way out of my league because he was funny and smart and liked Star Wars and for some reason he kept laughing at all my jokes, which are really bad, by the way.” Shiro huffs out a laugh and shakes his head. He smile turns rueful, gaze coming to rest on the twist of his hands together. “But I felt like we genuinely clicked, in a way that doesn’t usually happen to me with people other than my family.”

The more Shiro talks the less Keith feels like a part of the world around him. It has to be a dream, but he doubts his mind could ever conjure up something like this. Hope balloons in his throat and he struggles to pull in a full breath.

Shiro continues, “But instead of giving this really amazing guy my number and asking him out like I wanted to, I just left a note and hoped that it would work out so we could see each other again sometime. Which is just, well, maybe not nerdy so much as embarrassing, I guess.”

Now that he’s finished, Shiro purses his lips as if he’s regretting it all. He rubs absently at his prosthetic hand, head bowed.

“But anyway...” he trails off, letting the silence fill the space between them. It’s quiet, like even the river is holding its breath.

Keith knows he needs to say something. Shiro’s standing there with his heart all splayed out in front of him, looking more embarrassed with every second. Keith’s scared, though. Terrified really. He’s never done something like this, has no precedent to draw on. But he knows that if Shiro can gather his courage and entrust Keith with his feelings, he can grow some and do it too.

“That sounds pretty brave to me,” he says lowly. It’s his turn to avoid Shiro’s eyes. “And I don’t think that bartender guy is as cool as you think he is.”

“He has the top score for Black Hole 3—”

“Not cool, definitely not cool,” Keith interrupts, grinning down at his hands. “I think maybe if you could talk to him—”

“—Like if we somehow met again where I work—”

“Yeah, if you ever randomly met him again because his kid was sick or something, he would tell you that it’s not embarrassing and that night made his entire week, probably his year honestly.”

His voice pitches lower in its sincerity. “The book thing, that was so thoughtful. It’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me—him. Shit.

“And I, I just—” he stumbles out. He’s making an awkward mess of this. Shiro remains a firm line of heat at his side though, so Keith steels his nerves and resolutely meets his eyes. “I’m glad you decided to sit there that night. I’m so glad to have met you.”

Shiro breathes out his name. There isn’t much streetlight to see by, but his intent settles in the air between them. He leans in closer, body radiating warmth, and Keith follows. One of his hands moves up to rest on Keith’s neck and draws him the last few inches in until they’re both breathing the same air.

“Keith,” he says again, softly. He licks his lips. “Can I…?”

Keith nods. It feels like the world is resting on the last bit of distance between them. Shiro’s nose brushes his and then—

Jarring music has them both jumping back. They stare at each other, both panting. It takes Keith a moment to realize the music is coming from his back pocket, and he swears when he pulls his phone out and sees who’s calling.

“I, this is,” he tries to say and Shiro hurriedly nods.

“No, take it,” he urges. His cheeks are flushed a dark red. Keith turns away to pick up the call.

“Hey,” he says into the receiver, but Veronica starts speaking over him almost immediately.

“Keith, listen, Pidge is freaking out.” Keith stiffens immediately and beside him Shiro follows suit.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

“It took forever to get her to sleep and she woke up just screaming and now she won’t stop crying. I’ve been trying for hours to get her to calm down, but she’s freaking out. I just, I don’t know what to do.”

Guilt immediately floods his thoughts. He should have known not to leave them alone for the night, especially after the way Pidge had been acting before he left.

“Okay, I’ll— hold on, I’m on my way back,” he says, turning and already mentally routing his way. “It’ll be like, 30 minutes tops. Can you handle that?”

She says she can so they end the call. When he hangs up, he turns back to Shiro.

“Listen, I’m so sorry,” he begins, but Shiro shakes his head.

“Don’t worry about it.  If it was my girls, I’d do the same thing.”

He looks completely sincere—and Keith knows now without a doubt that he is, because that’s just the kind of person Shiro is—but he still hesitates. He really doesn’t want to leave. They’d been so close to something and he wants nothing more than to follow it through. His heart’s already halfway across the city with Pidge, though, and he knows it won’t be able to settle until he knows she’s okay.

Shiro’s smile is small. “I could walk you to the station?”

The night feels colder on their way back. Maybe it’s because they’re keeping a respectable distance from each other, or more likely because the air between them has frosted over. It’s not exactly awkward, but the silence lays over them a little more solemnly. He doesn’t let it last long, though; he owes Shiro an explanation.

He takes a breath. “Pidge and Matt’s mom, my sister Acxa, she died last spring.” The words catch a little in his throat. “We all thought it was just a cold, but it kept getting worse. Pneumonia, it turns out. When we finally got her to go to the hospital, there wasn’t’ much they could do.”

“I’m sorry, Keith.” He’s heard it a thousand times at this point, but Shiro at least sounds sincere.

“It’s been really hard on them,” Keith continues. “I don’t even know if they’re dealing with it right, or at all really. Tonight was the first night they’ve spent without me since losing her. I didn’t even think about Pidge waking up and me not being there. I can’t imagine how scared she must have felt.”

He draws in a deep breath and blows it all out in a rush. “Sometimes I just feel like I’m fucking all this up.”

It comes out jagged and ugly, the peak of something that’s been festering in his chest for a while.

Shiro lets them take a couple more steps before saying quietly, “I think we all feel like that sometimes. I always wonder if I should have toughed it out with my ex instead of getting a divorce. Who knows how it’s affected the girls.”

Keith glances over. He’d guessed about the divorce, but it’s different seeing the pain of it on Shiro’s face.

Shiro shrugs. “But there’s no way to change the past. We can only work with what we have now. For me, that’s making sure my girls know they’re loved by both their dads, even if they’re not together anymore.”

He turns his gaze on Keith, words gentle as he addresses him. “You obviously care about your kids a lot. You gave up so many parts of your life to take care of them. That doesn’t sound like fucking up at all.”

The words touch that deep ache in Keith’s chest, and he has to breathe through the hurt. He doesn’t answer Shiro, but he lets his words settle like a bandage over the worst of the pain.

When they reach the top of the stairs to the metro station, they both pause. Keith crosses his arms and digs his boot tip against the ground. He’s not really sure what he’s supposed to say. His thoughts sit in a mix of gratitude, worry, and disappointment, and he doesn’t know where to start.

As usual, Shiro beats him to it.

“Here,” he says, handing Keith the Minion plushy. Keith had forgotten all about it after Veronica’s call. “Didn’t want you to forget this.”

Keith smiles down at the doll before shifting his gaze up. He steps in and pulls Shiro down into a hug. Shiro doesn’t hesitate to return it, arms wrapping snugly around his back. His form is big enough that his presence engulfs Keith on all sides. Even his scent is comforting, warm and clean and safe.

“Thanks, Shiro,” Keith says into his neck. “For everything.”

A hand cups the back of his head. “Anytime.”

Before he loses his nerve, Keith brushes a kiss against the rough stubble of Shiro’s cheek. He pulls back and turns to start taking the steps two at a time. When he gets to the bottom, he takes a moment to look back. Shiro is still standing at the top of the stairs, the edges of his form hazy in the streetlight. He raises his hand to wave. Keith returns it and then turns to catch his train.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading:)


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